Full text of "Thrilling Wonder Stories v30n01 (1947 04)"

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I TALKED WITH GOD

• , . yes I did, actually and literally

As a result of that little
talk with God, some
twenty years ago, there
came into my life a
Power so staggering
that at first I wondered
about it: Then, when I
realized that it was the
Power of God, I discov-
ered that the shackles
which had bound me for over forty
years went a-shimmering. There
came into my life a Power the like
of which I had never known. Up
to that time I was perhaps the
world’s biggest failure.

NOW . . . ? Well my every dream
had come true. I am President of
The News-Review Publishing Co.
which publishes the largest circu-
lating daily newspaper in this area.
I live in a wonderful home which
has a beautiful pipe-organ in it. My
needs are all amply taken care of,

Dr. Frank B. Robinson

and I drive a wonder-
ful Cadillac.

YOU TOO CAN
TALK WITH GOD,
and when you do, if
there is lack in your
life, this same Power
which came into mine
can come into yours.
Fear, distress, and all
the other allied things pass out of
the life when this staggering Power
comes in. If you will fill in the
coupon below, I’ll send you free of
all cost, information which may
make you blink your eyes. It may
sound unbelievable at first, but it’s
true — believe me. So fill out and
mail the coupon ... NOW. This is
our 20th year of operations exclu-
clusively by mail, so you need have
no fear. We are quite reliable, and
are interested only in your finding
the same Power Dr. Robinson found.

FREE

Psychiana,

.Dept. X-35 Moscow, Idaho, U.S.A.

Please send me absolutely tree — details oi how
you discovered the Power of God in your life.

NAME

CITY

STREET AND NO. STATE

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you’re that man, here’s something that will
interest you.

Not a magic formula — not a get-rich-quick
scheme — butsomethingmoresubstantial, more practical.

Of course, you need something more than just the
desire to be an accountant. You’ve got to pay the price
—be willing to study earnestly, thoroughly.

Still, wouldn’t it be worth your while to sacrifice some
of your leisure in favor of interesting home study — over
a comparatively brief period in your life? Always pro-
vided that the rewards were good — a salary of $3,000
to $10,000?

An accountant’s duties are interesting, varied and of
real worth to his employers. He has standing!

Do you feel that such things aren’t for you? Well,
don’t be too sure. Very possibly they can be!

Why not, like so many before you, investigate
LaSalle’s modern Problem Method of training for an
accountancy position?

Just suppose you were permitted to work in a large
accounting house under the personal supervision of an
expert accountant. Suppose, with his aid, you studied
accounting principles and solved problems day by day
— easy ones at first — then the more difficult ones. If you
could do this — and if you could turn to him for advice
as the problems became complex — soon you’d master
them all.

You cover accountancy from the basic Principles
righdup through Accountancy Systems and IncomeTax
Procedure. Then you add C. P. A. Training and pre-
pare for the C. P. A. examinations.

As you go along, you absorb the principles of Audit-
ing, Cost Accounting, Business Law, Statistical Con-
trol, Organization, Management and Finance.

Your progress is as speedy as you care to make it —
depending on your own eagerness to learn and the time
you spend in study.

Will recognition come? The only answer, as you know,
is that success does come to the man who is really
trained. It’s possible your employers will notice your
improvement in a very few weeks or months. Indeed,
many LaSalle graduates have paid for their training^ —
with increased earnings — before they have completed it!
For accountants, who are trained in organization and
management, are the executives of the future.

Write For This Free Book

For your own good, don’t put off investigation of aU
the facts. Write for our free 48-page book, “Accoun-
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afraid of serious home study. Send us the coupon now.

Over 2300 Certified G. I. APPROVED

That’s the training you follow in principle under the
LaSalle Problem Method.

Public Accountants among
LaSalle alumni

LASALLE EXTENSION UNIVERSITY

A CORRESPONDENCE INSTITUTION

417 South Dearborn Street, Dept, 4329-H, Chicago 5, Illinois

I want to be an accountant. Send me, without cost or obligation, the 48-page book, “Accountancy
The Profession That Pays/* and full information about your accountancy training program.

Vol. XXX, No. 1 A THRILLING PUBLICATION April, 1947

A Complete Fantastic Novel

WAY OF THE GODS

By HENRY KUTTNER

Spawn of atomic fission, this strange company
of mutants exiled by humanity battles against
enslavement in a foreign world dominated by
the evil spirit of the Crystal Mountain! 11

Two Complete Novelets

THE GREGORY CIRCLE William Fitzgerald 50

Trying to connect hillbilly Bud Gregory with the atomic dust destroying
America was like joining simple math and nuclear physics!

QUEST TO CENTAURUS George 0. Smith 74

Given the joke assignment of tracking down a Kilroy of space, Alfred
Weston discovers the fate of the solar system is in his hands!

Short Stories

SKIT-TREE PLANET Murray Leinster 41

Wentworth and Haynes struggle against an intangible distant enemy

VICTORIOUS FAILURE Bryce Walton 66

Professor Klauson is driven back from the threshold of immortality

THE RELUCTANT SHAMAN L. Sprague de Camp 90

Virgil Hathaway becomes the possessor of eight stone-throwing sprites

Special Features

THE READER SPEAKS The Editor 6

THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY A Department 111

Cover Painting by Earle Bergey — Illustrating "Way of the Gods"

Published every other month by STANDARD MAGAZINES, INC., 10 East 40th Street, New York 16,
N. Y. N. L. Pines, President. Copyright, 1947, by Standard Magazines, Inc. Subscription (12 issues)
$1.80, single copies, 15c. Foreign and Canadian postage extra. Entered as second-class matter May 21,
1936, at the Post Office at New York, N. Y., under the Act of March 3, 1879. Names of all characters
used in stories and semi-fiction articles are fictitious. If the name of any living person or existing
institution is used, it is a coincidence.

PRINTED IN THE U. S. A.

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ANY SET ON APPROVAL

All you need do to get any set for personal examination is
to fill in and mail the coupon and give required informa-
tion. Read the generous offer in coupon and send today.

AMERICAN TECHNICAL SOCIETY

Vocational Publishers Since 1898

Dept. X449, Drexel at 58th Street, Chicago 37, Illinois

- SEND COUPON TODAY JP

AMERICAN TECHNICAL SOCIETY, Dept. X449

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Send for 10 days’ free use, the following set of books :

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Please attach letter stating age, occupation and name and
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address as reference. Men in service also please give home
address.

A Department Conducted by THE EDITOR

HOIL "THAT with Bell completing rocket
planes designed to hit a top speed of

™ * 1,700 miles per hour, with coffee
coming in compressed cakes like bouillon
cubes and machines without feelings replac-
ing cotton sharecroppers with same, science is
coming on apace in fields other than nuclear
physics. And writers of science fiction are
really having a heck of a time remaining
ahead of the field.

One of the most arresting and significant
of all the new gadgets to turn up in the
news, however, was the artificial snowstorm
described in a recent report of General Elec-
tric Corporation. This is something to pon-
der over during both long winter and short
summer nights.

After discovery that dry ice pellets, under
certain atmospheric conditions, could pro-
duce snowflakes in the laboratory, GE tech-
nicians put their discovery to a field test.
When meteorologists reported a large cloud
over Mount Greylock in the Berkshires of
Western Massachusetts, they took off in a
plane loaded with the frozen carbon dioxide
formerly used only to keep ice cream and
other perishable foods sufficiently gelid.

Aloft, they sprayed that cloud, which was
some three miles in length, with the pellets.
The result was one very local and very early -
season snowstorm. It was finally decided that
one pellet, about the size of a pea, could pro-
duce several tons of snow in passing through
such a cloud.

Climate Control in Reverse

This is the long-awaited climate control
in reverse' — and with a vengeance. When
Mark Twain complained that no one ever
“did anything about” the weather, it is highly

dubious he was thinking of making it worse.
Granted reasonably chilly winter weather,
what the Chamber of Commerce of, say,
Louisville could do to Cincinnati or Dallas
to Forth Worth or vice versa is appalling to
consider!

Just a plane and some dry ice ground up
in a hamburger machine could create any
number of local Siberias. Now if the GE
scientists can come up with as simple a means
for causing clouds to evaporate entirely, we
could keep a couple of mountains under
snow for skiers and let the rest of the world
off scot free.

The possible military ramifications of the
very real artificial snowstorm are equally
appalling. A couple of bombers or even
Piper Cubs equipped with dry ice could
probably raise merry hob with a foe’s com-
munications and turn shock troops into snow
shovelers for months at a time.

As a matter of fact, this reporter is in
hearty favor of more and more horrible mil-
itary devices, for reasons he will explain. It
is, to say the least, highly improbable that
we should retain sole control of the atomic
bomb for long. And it will probably be a
darned good thing for the world when ev-
eryone has it.

Deadly Vapors

Poison gas was the great terror weapon of
World War One. When first introduced by
the Germans against the Canadians at the
Second Battle of Ypres in 1915, it threatened
completely to disrupt the Allied battle line
in Flanders. The Allies were quick to make
their own and to give the Kaiser’s legions a
dose of the lung-destroying chemicals.

More and more deadly gases were invented
(Continued on page 8)

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THE E.EADEH 5PEA14S

(Continued from page 6)
as were more and more effective means of
propagating them in desired areas. By the
time Germany invaded Poland in 1939 to start
World War Two, every country had great
stockpiles of deadly vapors and could turn
out masks in dime-store profusion.

But, except for some isolated instances in
Ethopia and China where the Italians and
Japanese employeed the stuff against de-
fenseless people, no one turned poison gas
loose. The reason, of course, was that all
were vulnerable and all were supplied with
the weapon. Its use would have amounted to
military insanity. And contrary to pacifist
opinion, military men are not usually bait for
the bughouse.

With planes attaining round-the-world
ranges so that no city anywhere is safe from
any foe in the world, the use of the atom
bomb will soon be even more ridiculous. No
leader of any country has any desire to see
his own cities vaporized and their popula-
tions' destroyed — which is what will happen
if he launches an atom bomb attack once the
bomb is a universal possession.

The same limitation holds for biological
or bacteriological warfare, that holy terror of
the Sunday supplements. So let’s have more
and more horrible inventions. The more
horrible the invention the more the threat
of retaliation will ensure the peace the world
so sadly needs to bind up its wounds.

OUR NEXT ISSUE

F OR ITS June appearance, THRILLING
WONDER STORIES presents a trio of
long stories which should give lovers of that
pseudo-science known as scientifiction or,
more briefly, as STF, a full meal of interest-
ing and thought-provoking, to say nothing of
exciting, reading material.

First in line is THE BOOMERANG CIR-
CUIT, by Murray Leinster, final short novel
in the brilliant Kim Rendell trilogy of which
the first two stories, THE DISCIPLINARY
CIRCUIT and THE MANLESS WORLDS,
have already appeared in TWS.

Once more Kim Rendell is called in to res-
cue the inhabitants of the freedom-loving
Second Galaxy from attack — this time the
final and most cunning effort of those who
would control all the skies for exploitation.
With their matter transmitters destroyed,
things look very black indeed for Second
Galaxy inhabitants, who are once more being
brought under the control of the vicious dis-
ciplinary circuit in the hands of ambitious
(Continued on page 97)

* They Never Knew,f

It Was SO EAST To Ploy

Thousands Now Play Popular Songs
Who Didn’t Know a Note of Music Before

You, toe, con born year favorite
instrument at home, without
a teacher, this quick, •
easy, msney-sovinq way

T HINK of the fun YOU are missing! The popularity,
friendship, good times! Why? Because you think it’s
hard to learn music. Y T ou have an idea that it’s a slow,
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That’s not the twentieth-century way ! Surely you’ve heard
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fascinating that it's like playing a game. Imagine! You
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cost of only a few cents a day! You learn by the famous
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wrong! And best of all, you start playing real tunes almost
at once, from the very first lesson.

No needless, old-fashioned “scales”
and exercises. No confused, perplex-
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No wonder hundreds of thousands of
people have taken up music this easy
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Sound interesting? Well, just name
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we’ll prove you CAN! If interested,
mail the coupon or write.

U. S. SCHOOL OF MUSIC
2944 Brunswick Bldg.

New York 10, N. Y.

Learned Quickly at Home. “I didn't

dream I could actually learn to play
without a teacher. Now when I play
for people they hardly believe that I
learned to play so well in so short a
time." *H. C. S., Calif.

Music is the magic key to friendship, fun,
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Thousands have discovered unexpected pleasure
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Send for FREE Booklet and
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down, in the privacy of your own
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decide for yourself whether you want
to play this easy way.

U. $. SCHOOL OF MUSIC

2944 Brunswick Bldg., New York 10, N. Y.

I am interested in music study, particularly in the instru-
ment indicated below. Please send me your free booklet.

"How to Learn Music at Home"
Picture Sample.

"Be- Well Worth Money. Surprised Friends.

your course "The course is fully "People who hear me
one note self explanatory. When Play don't understand
three one is finished with it how I do it. They ask
started there is little one need if I haven't had lessons
Pve learn. It is well worth from a teacher. To
many the money and I fully their surprise they find
is believe you have the I haven't. I'm glad to
'* finest course on the be a student of your
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G., Clarksburg, W. Va. Kans.

♦Actual pupils* names on request. Pictures by Professional models

Piano

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Hawaiian fiuitar
Violin

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Saxophone
Trumpet, Cornet

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Piccolo

Name...

(PLEASE PRINT)

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City....

and the free Print &

Modern
Elementary
Harmony
Mandolin
Practical Finger
Control
Have You

This Instru, ?

...State.

Notes If you are under 16 yrs. of age, parent must sign coupon.

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WE’LL HAVE TO MAKE V !

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|teC”"y I THOUGHT YOU'D LIKE
gW THAT THIN GILLETTE,
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HELICOPTERS HAVE F WHY, DAD :TH ATS S
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GILLETTE RAZOR PRECISELY AND PROTECT f
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Together they glided across the rashing air currents (Chap. II)

WAY OF THE CODS

By HENRY I4UTTNER

Spawn of atomic fission , this strange company of mutants
exiled by humanity battles against enslavement in a foreign
world dominated by the evil Spirit of the Crystal Mountain!

CHAPTER I
New Worlds

H E LOOKED at the October morning
all about him as if he had never-
seen October before. That was not
true, of course. But he knew that he would
never see it again. Unless they had mornings,

and Octobers — where he was going. It did not
seem likely, though the old man had talked
a great deal about key-patterns and the se-
lectivity of the machine, and the multiple
universes spinning like motes in a snow-
storm through infinity.

"But I’m human!” he said aloud, sitting
cross-legged on the warm brown earth and
feeling the breeze which gave the lie instantly

A CONFUTE FANTASTIC NOVEL

12 THRILLING WONDER STORIES

to his thought. He felt the gentle pull at his
shoulder-blades which meant that his wings
were fluttered a little by the breeze, and in-
stinctively he flexed the heavy bands of mus-
cle across his chest to control the wing-sur-
faces.

He was not human. That was the trouble.
And this world, this bright October world
that stretched to the horizon around him was
made to shelter the race that had become
dominant, and was jealous of its dominion.
Humanity, that had no place for strangers
among its ranks.

The others did not seem to care very much.
They had been reared in the creche almost
from birth, under a special regime that iso-
lated them from the humans. The old man
had been responsible for that He had built
the huge house on the hillside, swooping
curves of warmly-colored plastic that blend-
ed into the brown and green of the land —
an asylum that had finally failed. The walls
were breached.

“Kern,” someone behind him said.

The winged man turned his head, glancing
up past the dark curve of his wings. A girl
came toward him down the slope from the
house. Her name was Kua. Her parents bad
been Polynesian, and she had the height and
the lithe grace of her Oceanic race, and the
shining dark hair, the warm, honey-colored
skin. But she wore opaque dark glasses, and
across her forehead a band of dark plastic
that looked opaque too, and was not. Be-
neath, her face was lovely, the red mouth
generously curved, the features softly round-
ed like the features of all her race.

She was not human either.

“It’s no use worrying, Kern,” she said,
smiling down at him. “It’ll work out all right.
You’ll see.”

“All right!” Kern snorted scornfully. “You
think so, do you?”

Kua glanced instinctively around the hill-
side, making sure they were alone. Then she
put both hands to her face and slipped off the
glasses and the dark band from her fore-
head. Kern, meeting the gaze of her bright
blue eye, was conscious again of the little
shock he always felt when he looked into her
uncovered face.

For Kua was a cyclops. She had one eye
centered in her forehead. And she was —
when the mind could accept her as she was,
not as she should be — a beautiful woman in
spite of it. That blue brilliance in the dusky
face had a depth and luster beyond the eyes

of humans. Heavy lashes ringed it, and the
gaze could sink fathom upon fathom in her
eye and never plumb its depths.

UA’S eye was a perfect lens. Whatever
lens can do, her eye could do. No one
could be sure just what miraculous mechan-
isms existed beyond the blue surface, but
she could see to a distance almost beyond
the range of the ordinary telescope and she
could focus down upon the microscopic. And
there may have been other things the single
eye could do. One did not question one’s
companions too closely in this house of the
mutations.

“You’ve been with us two years, Kern,”
she was saying now. “Only two years. You
don’t know yet how strong we are, or how
much we can accomplish among us. Bruce
Hallam knows what he’s doing, Kern. He
never works on theories. Or if he does, the
theories become truth. He has a mind like
that. You don’t know us, Kern!”

“You can’t fight a whole world.”

“No. But we can leave it.” She smiled,
and he knew she saw nothing of the golden
morning all around them. She knew nothing,
really, of the cities that dotted the world of
1980, or the lives that were so irrevocably
alien to her. They should have been alien to
Kern too, but not until he was eighteen had
the wings begun to grow upon his shoulders.

“I don’t know, Kua,” he said. “I’m not sure
I want to. I had a father and a mother —
brothers — friends.”

“Your parents are your greatest enemies,”
she told him flatly. “They gave you life.”
He looked away from the penetrating stare
of that great blue single eye and past her at
the big plastic house. That had been asylum,
after the massacre of 1967 — asylum against
the hordes bent on extirpating the freakish
monsters created by atomic radiation. He
could not remember, of course, but he had
read about it, never guessing then that such a
thing would ever apply to him. The old man
had told him the story.

First had come the atomic war, brief, ter-
rible, letting loose nameless radiations upon
the world. And then had followed the wave
upon wave of freak births among those ex-
posed to it. Genes and chromosomes altered
beyond comprehension. Monstrous things
were born of human parents.

One in ten, perhaps, had been a successful
mutation. And even those were dangerous
to homo sapiens.

14 THRILLING WONDER STORIES

Evolution is like a roulette wheel. The con-
ditions of the earth favor certain types of
mutation capable of survival. But atomic
energies had upset the balance, and mutations
spawned in sheer madness began to spread.
Not many, of course. Not many were viable.
But two-headed things were born— and lived
— along with geniuses and madmen. World
Council had studied the biological and social
problem for a long time before it recommend-
ed euthanasia. Man’s evolution had been
planned and charted. It must not be allowed
to swerve from the track, or chaos would be
let loose.

Geniuses, mutant humans with abnormally
high I.Q.’s, were allowed to survive. Of the
others, none lived after they had been detect-
ed. Sometimes they were difficult to detect.
By 1968 only the true-line mutations, faith-
ful to the human biological norm, were alive
— with certain exceptions.

S UCH as the old man’s son, Sam Brewster.

He was a freak, with a certain — talent. A
superhuman talent. The old man had dis-
obeyed the Government law, for he had not
sent the infant to the labs for checking and
testing— and annihilation. Instead, he had
built this great house, and the boy had never
gone far beyond its grounds.

Gradually then, partly to provide the youth
with companionship, partly out of compassion,
the father had begun to gather others togeth-
er. Secretly, a mutant infant here, a mutant
child there, he brought them in, until he had
a family of freaks in the big plastic house.
He had not taken them haphazardly. Some
would not have been safe to live with. Some
were better dead from the start. But those
with something to offer beyond their freak-
ishness, he found and sheltered.

It was the bringing in of Kern that gave the
secret away. The boy had gone too long among
ordinary humans, while his wings grew. He
was eighteen, and his pinions had a six-foot
spread, when old Mr. Brewster found him.
His family had tried to keep him hidden, but
the news was leaking out already when he
left for the Brewster asylum, and in the years
since it had spread until the authorities at last
issued their ultimatum.

“It was my fault,” Kern said bitterly. “If
it hadn’t been for me, you’d never have been
molested.”

“No.” Kua’s deep, luminous eye fixed his.
“Sooner or later you know they’d have found
us. Better let it happen now, while we’re all

still young and adaptable. We can go and
enjoy going, now.” Her voice shook a little
with deep excitement. “Think of it, Kern!
New worlds! Places beyond the earth, where
there could be people like us!”

“But Kua, I’m human! I feel human. I
don’t want to leave. This is where I belong!”
“You say that because you grew up among
normal people. Kern, you’ve got to face it.
Tlie only place for any of us is — somewhere
away.”

“I know.” He grinned wryly. “But I don’t
have to like it. Well — we’d better go back.
They’ll have the ultimatum by now, I sup-
pose. May as well hear it. I know what the
answer is. Don’t you?”

She nodded, watching his involuntary
glance around the empty blue sky, the warm
October hills. A world for humans. But for
humans alone. . . .

Back in the Brewster plastic asylum, the
inmates had assembled.

“There isn’t much time,” old Mr. Brewster
said. “They’re on their way here now, to
take you all back for euthanasia.”

Sam Brewster laughed harshly.

“We could show ’em a few tricks.”

“No. You can’t fight the whole world. You
could kill many of them, but it wouldn’t do
any good. Bruce’s machine is the only hope
for you all.” His voice broke a little. “It’s
going to be a lonely world for me, children,
after you’ve gone.”

They looked at him uncomfortably, this
strange, unrelated family of freak mutations,
scarcely more than the children he had called
them, but matured beyond their years by
their strange rearing.

“There are worlds beyond counting, as you
know,” Bruce said precisely. “Infinite num-
bers — worlds where we might not be freaks
at all. Somewhere among them there must
be places where each of our mutations is a
norm. I’ve set the machine to the aggregate
pattern of us all and it’ll find our equivalents
— something to suit one of us at least. And
the others can go on looking. I can build
the machine in duplicate on any world, any-
where, where I can live at all.” He smiled,
and his strange light eyes glowed.

It was curious, Kern thought, how fre-
quently in mutations the eves were the give-
away. Kua, of course. And Sam Brewster
with his terrible veiled glance protected by
its secondary lid which drew back only in
anger. And Bruce Hallam, whose strangeness
was not visible but existed only in the amaz-

WAY OF THE GODS 15

ing intricacies of his brain, looked upon the
alien world with eyes that mirrored the mys-
teries behind them.

Bruce knew machinery — call it machinery
for lack of a more comprehensive word —
with a knowledge that was beyond learning.
He could produce miracles with any set of
devices his fingers could contrive. He seemed
to sense by sheer instinct the courses of in-
finite power, and harness them with the sim-
plest ease, the simplest mechanics.

There was a steel cubicle in the corner of
the room with a round steel door which had
taken Bruce a week to set up. Over it a panel
burned with changing light, flickering
through the spectrum and halting now and
then upon clear red. When it was red, then
the — the world — upon which the steel door
opened was a world suitable for the little
family of mutations to enter. The red light
meant it could support human life, that it
paralleled roughly the world they al-
ready knew, and that something in its essen-
tial pattern duplicated the pattern of at least
one of the mutant group.

Kem was dizzy when he thought of the
sweep of universes past that door, world
whirling upon world where no human life
could dwell, worlds of gas and flame, worlds
of ice and rock. And, one in a countless
number, a world of sun and water like their
own. . . .

I T WAS incredible. But so were the wings
at his own back, so was Kua’s cyclopean
eye, and Sam Brewster’s veiled gaze, and so
was the brain in Bruce Hallam’s skull, which
had built a bridge for them all.

He glanced around the group. Sitting back
against the wall, in shadow, Byrna, the last
of the mutant family, lifted her gray gaze to
his. Compassion touched him as always when
he met her eyes.

Byrna was physically the most abnormal
of them all, in her sheer smallness. She came
scarcely to Kern’s elbow when she was stand-
ing. She was proportioned perfectly in the
scale of her size, delicate, fragile as some-
thing of glass. But she was not beautiful to
look at. There was a wrongness about her
features- that made them pathetically ugly,
and the sadness in her gray eyes seemed to
mirror the sadness of all misfit things.

Byrna’s voice had magic in it, and so did
her brain. Wisdom came as simply to her as
knowledge came to Bruce Hallam, but she
had infinitely more warmth than he. Bruce,

Kern sometimes thought, would dismember a
human as dispassionately as he would cut
wire in two if he needed the material for an
experiment. Bruce looked the most normal
of them all, but he would not have passed
the questioning of the most superficial mental
examination.

Now his voice was impatient. “What are
we waiting for? Everything’s ready.”

“Yes, you must go quickly,” the old man
said. “Look— the light’s coming toward red
now, isn’t it?”

The panel above the steel door was orange.
As they watched it shifted and grew ruddier.
Bruce went silently forward and laid his hand
on the lever that opened the panel. When the
light was pure red he pushed the steel bar
down.

In half-darkness beyond the opening a gust
of . luminous atoms blew across a craggy
horizon. Against it there was a suggestion of
towers and arches and columns, and lights
that might have been aircraft swung in steady
orbits above.

No one spoke. After a moment Bruce
closed the door again, grimacing. The light
above it hovered toward a reddish purple and
then turned blue.

“Not that world,” Bruce said. “We’ll try
again.”

In the shadow Byrna murmured:

“It doesn’t matter — any world will be the
same for us.” Her voice was pure music.

“Listen! Do you hear planes?” the old man
said. “It’s time, children. You must go.”

There was silence. Every eye watched the
lighted panel. Colors hovered there to and fro
through the spectrum. A faint ruddiness be-
gan to glow again.

“This time we’ll take it if it. looks all right,”
Bruce said, and laid his hand again upon the
lever.

The light turned red. Soundlessly the
round door swung open.

Sunlight came through, low green hills, and
the clustered roofs of a town were visible a
little distance away in a valley.

Without a word or a backward glance
Bruce stepped through the door. One by one
the others moved after him, Kem last. Kern’s
lips were pressed together and he did not
glance behind him. He could have seen the
hills of earth beyond the windows, and the
blue October sky. He would not look at them.
He shrugged his wings together and stooped
to enter the gateway of the new world.

Behind them the old man watched in si-

IS THRILLING WONDER STORIES

lence, seeing the work of his lifetime ending
before his eyes. The gulf between them was
too broad for leaping. He was human and
they were not. Across a vast distance, vaster
than the gulf between worlds, he saw the
family of the mutations step over their
threshold and vanish forever.

He closed the door after them. The red
light faded above it. He turned toward his
own door where the knocking of World
Council’s police had already begun to sum-
mon him to his accounting.

CHAPTER II
His Own Kind

A BOVE them, the sky was blue. The five
aliens who were alien to all worlds
alike stood together on a hilltop looking
down.

“It’s beautiful,” Kua said. “I’m glad we
chose this one. But I wonder what the next
one would have been like if we could have
waited.”

“It will be the same no matter where we
go,” Byrna’s infinitely sweet voice murmured.

“Look at the horizon,” Bruce said. “What
is it?”

They saw then the first thing that marked
this world alien to earth. For the most part
it might have been any hilly wooded land
they knew from the old place; even the roofs
of the village looked spuriously familiar. But
the horizon was curiously misted, and before
them, far off, rose — something— to an impos-
sible height halfway up the zenith.

“A mountain?” Kern asked doubtfully.
“It’s too high, isn’t it?”

“A glass mountain,” Kua said. “Yes, it is
glass — or plastic? I can’t be sure.”

She had uncovered her single eye and the
shining pupil was contracted as she gazed
over impossible distances at the equally im-
possible bulk of that thing on the horizon. It
rose in a vast sweep of opalescent color, like
a translucent thundercloud hanging over the
whole land. Knowing it for a mountain, the
mind felt vertiginous at the thought of such
tremendous bulk towering overhead, »
“It looks clear,” Kua said. “All the way
through. I can’t tell what’s beyond it. Just
an enormous mountain made out of— of plas-
tic? I wonder.”

Kern was aware of a tugging at his wing-

surfaces, and glanced around in quick recog-
nition of the strengthening breeze. He was
the first to notice it.

“It’s beginning to blow. And listen — do
you hear?”

It grew louder as they stood there, a shrill,
strengthening whine in the air coming from
the direction of the cloudlike mountain. A
whine that grew so rapidly they had scarcely
recognized it as noise before it was deafening
all about them, and the wind was like a sud-
den hurricane.

That passed in a gust, noise and wind alike,
leaving them breathless and staring at one
another in dismay.

“Look, over there, quick!” Kua said. “An-
other one’s coming!”

Far off, but moving toward them with ap-
palling speed, came a monstrous spinning
tower of — light? Smoke? They could not be
sure.

It whirled like a waterspout in a typhoon,
vast, bendng majestically and righting itself
again, and the air spun with it, and the wild,
shrill screaming began again.

The vortex of brilliance passed them far to
the left, catching them in its shrieking hurri-
cane of riven air and then releasing them
again into shaken silence. But there was an-
other one on its way before they had caught
their breath again, a whirling, bowing tower
that spun screeching off toward the right.
And after it another, and close behind that,
a fourth.

The noise and the violence of the wind
stunned Kern so that he had no idea what
was happening to the others on the hilltop.
He was susceptible because of his wings.
The hurricane caught him up and whirled
him sideward down the slope— shrieking in
his ears with a noise so great it was almost
silence, beyond the range of sound.

Stunned, he struggled for balance, leaning
against the rushing wall of air as solid as a
wall of stone. For a moment or two he kept
the ground underfoot. Then his wings be-
trayed him and, in spite of himself, he felt
the six-foot pinions blown wide and the
muscles ached across his chest with the vio-
lence of the wind striking their spread sur-
faces.

The horizon tilted familiarly as he swooped
in a banking curve. The glass mountain for
a moment hung overhead and he looked
straight down at the wooded hills, seeing tiny
blowing figures reeling across the slopes in
the grip of the hurricane winds. Hanging

WAY OF THE GODS

here far above the treetops, he could see that
the monsters of whirling light were coming
thicker and faster across the hilltops, striding
like giants, trailing vortices of wind and
sound in their wake. For an instant he
swung in the grip of the hurricane, watching
the vast whirling spindles moving and bow-
ing majestically across the face of the new
earth.

Then the vortex caught him again and he
was spun blindly into the heart of the whirl-
wind, deafened with its terrible screaming
uproar, wrenched this way and that upon
aching wings, too dizzy for fear or thought.
Time ceased. Half senseless, he was whirled
to and fro upon the irresistible winds. He
closed his eyes against flying dtist, locked his
hands over his ears to shut out the deafening
shrill of the blast, and let the hurricane do
with him as it would.

Kern felt a hand on his arm and roused
himself out of a half-stupor.

He thought, I must be on the ground
again, and made an instinctive effort to sit
up. The motion threw him into a ludicrous
spin and he opened his eyes wide to see the
earth whirling far below him.

He was coasting at terrific speed through
the upper air upon a cold, screaming high-
way of wind, and moving easily beside him, *
riding on broad pinions like his own, a girl
paralleled his flight.

ONG pale hair streamed behind her
away from her blue-eyed face, whipped
to pinkness by the blast. She was calling
something to him, but the words were
snatched from her lips by the wind and he
heard nothing except that shrill, continuous
howling all around them. He could see that
she held him by one arm, and with her free
hand was pointing downward vehemently.
He could not hear her words, and knew he
probably could not understand them if he
did, but the gesture’s meaning he could not
mistake.

Nodding, he shrugged his left wing high
and arched his body for a long downward
spiral toward the ground. The girl turned
with him, and together they glided sidewise
across the rushing air-currents, delicately
tacking against the wind, picking their way
by instinctive muscular reactions of the
spread pinions, while below them the ground
swayed and turned like a fluid sea.

Kern glided downward on a wave of exul-
tation like nothing he had ever experienced

He heard a voice of impossible sweetness, and slowly, slowly,
he felt warmth return to him (Chap. VII)

before in his life. He knew little about this
world or about the girl beside him, but one
thing stood out clearly — he was no longer
alone. No longer the only winged being on
an alien planet. And this long downward
glide, like the motion of perfect dancers re-
sponding each to the other’s most delicate
motion, was the most satisfying thing he had
ever known.

18 THRILLING WONDER STORIES

For the first time he realized one of the
great secrets of a flying race — to fly alone is
to know only half the joy of flying. When
another winged being moves beside you on
the airways, speed matching speed, wings
beating as one, then at last you taste the full
ecstasy of flight.

Kern was breathless with joy and excite-
ment when the ground swooped up at them
and he banked against the rush of his glide.
With suddenly fluttering wings, he reversed
his position in the air and felt with both feet
for the solid earth. He had to run a little to
cut down his speed, and the girl ran beside
him, breathless and laughing a bit as she ran.

When they came to a halt and swung to
face one another the long ashen hair blew
forward in a cloud that had caught up with
her at last, and she fought it, laughing, and
brushed back the tangled mass with both
hands, the pale wings the exact color of her
hair folding back from her shoulders.

He saw now that she wore a tight tunic of
some very fine, supple leather, and long tight
boots of the same material. The hilt of a
jeweled knife stood up against her ribs from
a jeweled belt.

Around them the wind still blew cold and
shrill, but the blast of it was slackening no-
ticeably and warmth was creeping back little
by little into the air. They stood on a wooded
hill, under trees whose whipping branches
added to the tumult of noise, and Kern could
see a broad vista of the land before him, with
no more of the vast bending giants of the hur-
ricane moving across it. The storm must be
over, he thought.

The girl spoke. She had a pleasant con-
tralto voice, and the language she spoke was
slightly guttural and of course entirely
strange. Kern saw the surprise and doubt on
her face when she saw that he did not under-
stand her.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re a pretty thing.
I wish we could talk to each other.”

She matched his smile, but the bewilder-
ment deepened on her face.

Kern thought, She can’t believe I don’t
know her language. Could that mean there’s
only one tongue spoken in this world? It’s
wishful thinking— -I want so much to believe
it! Because that might mean the people here
are all winged, and move around so easily
that separate languages haven’t had a chance
to evolve.

His heart was beating faster, with an eager-
ness that he found a little ludicrous. He had

never suspected even in his own dreams how
much it would mean to him to belong at last
to a race that could accept him as one of its
own. Bruce Hallam had set his machine in
the aggregate pattern of the whole mutant
group, knowing as he did so how unlikely it
was that more than one of them could hope
for an equivalent world on a single planet.
But Bruce’s skill being what it was, Kern told
himself there was no reason to be surprised
that the expected had happened.

This world was his own. A winged world.
He was luckiest and first of the group to find
a place where he belonged. Exultation closed
up his throat with the joy of being no longer
alien.

“Or maybe I’m building too much on one
example,” he warned himself aloud. “Are
we all winged in this world, girl? Say some-
thing, quick. I want to learn your language!
Answer me, girl — are you an alien too, or is
this the world where I belong?”

She laughed at him, recognizing the half-
serious tone of his voice though the words
meant nothing. And then her glance went
across his shoulder, and a look of subtle with-
drawal crossed her face. She said something
in her guttural tongue and nodded toward
the trees behind Kern.

He turned. A third winged figure was
walking toward them under the still-roaring
trees, wings whipped by the wind until the
newcomer staggered now and then when the
full blast caught him.

K ERN was aware at first only of profound
thankfulness. Another winged person
was almost the answer to his remaining doubt.
Where there were two, surely there must be
many.

This was a man. Like the girl, he wore thin,
tight leather and a dagger at his belt. His «
hair was red, and so were his silky wings,
but his face was duskily tanned and Kern
caught the flash of sidelong, light eyes as the
man approached them. He saw, too, in anoth-
er moment, that the newcomer was a hunch-
back. Between the shining reddish wings the
man’s back was slightly crooked, so that he
looked up at them with his head awry. He
had a young face, with beautiful clear planes,
beneath the darkness of his tan.

“Gerd — ” the girl called, and then hesi-
tated. He flashed the light eyes at her, and
Kern decided it was probably his name.

The pale gaze moved back to Kern, and
watched him searchingly as the hunchback

WAY OF THE GODS 19

fought the wind to the shelter of their tree.
The man was wary, ready for distrust before
he so much as saw Kern’s face. It was odd,
in a way.

They talked, the girl excitedly in her con-
tralto voice, guttural words tumbling over
each other. Gerd’s answers were brief, in an
unexpectedly deep tone. Presently he un-
sheathed his dagger and with it gestured
toward Kern and the valley below them.

Kern bristled a little. There was no need
for threats. If these people were still in a
state of undevelopment where knives were
their customary weapon, he was far beyond
them in some ways at least. It was not a
pleasant introduction to this world, where he
felt himself already native, to have those first
directions pointed out with a bare blade.

The girl, seeing his scowl, laughed gently
and came forward to take his arm. She ges-
tured Gerd away with her other hand, and
he smiled grimly and stood back. The girl
fluttered her wings a little and made a swoop-
ing gesture of her hand to indicate flight.
She pointed to the valley. Then she stepped
away to the brow of the hill, unfolded her
wings, tested the dying wind with them, and
leaned forward with sublime confidence into
the void.

The updraft caught her beneath the pinions
and bore her aloft on a beautiful sweep, her
pale hair blowing like a banner. In midair
she twisted to beckon, and Kern laughed in
sheer delight and ran to follow her, spreading
his dark wings so that at the fourth stride,
with a leap, suddenly he was airborne. It was
a glorious feeling to fly without shame or
need of concealment. He scarcely heard the
beat of wings behind him as the hunchback
took to the air in their wake. The joy of fly-
ing in company was great enough just now
to shut out all other thoughts from Kern’s
mind.

They swept high along the slow-running
river of wind over a winding valley. Kern,
watching for the companions with whom he
had entered this wonderful world, saw no
motion at all among the trees they soared
over. He caught sight presently of a cluster
of roofs far ahead, at the top of the valley,
built around a stream that wound to and fro
among the houses, and was filled with excited
speculation as they neared the village.

My people, he thought. My own people.
What kind of a town will it be, and what sort
of culture? How fast can I learn the lan-
guage? There’s so much to find out.

The thought broke in his mind. For some-
thing — he had no name for it — was stirring
very strangely through his body.

For an instant the whole airy world went
blind around him. It was as if a new pair of
lungs had opened up within him and he had
drawn a deep, full breath of such air as no
human ever tasted before. It was as if new
eyes had opened in his head and he had
looked on a new dimension with multiple
sight. It was like neither of these, nor was it
like anything a man ever experienced before.
New, new, inexpressibly new!

And it was gone.

In flight Kern staggered a little, his wings
forgetting to beat the sustaining air. The
thing had come and gone so quickly, and yet
it was not a wholly unfamiliar thing, after all.
Once before something like it had happened.
Something, different, but at the time heart -
breakingly new. It was when he first felt the
wings thrust out upon his shoulders. When
he first felt the change within himself that
cut him off from mankind.

“Am I changing again?” he asked himself
fiercely. “Isn’t the mutation over yet? I won’t
change! I belong here now — I won’t let any-
thing spoil that!”

The feeling was gone. He could not re-
member even now what it had been actually
like. He would not change! He would fight
change while breath remained in him. What-
ever strange new mutation struggled now for
being in his mysterious flesh he would stran-
gle before he let it come between him and
these people with wings.

It had gone, now. He would forget it. It
should be as if it had never happened.

CHAPTER III
Gathering Danger

UNLIGHT winked from the diamond-
paned windows of the village. They cir-
cled above the rooftops and came in against
the wind for a landing on the high, flat roof
of the central building, its open square paved
with tiles painted in bright, crude pictures
of flying men and women.

From above Kern could see the cobbled
streets winding narrowly past overhanging
eaves, little stone bridges arching the stream
that gushed rapidly down through the village.
Flowers were bright in narrow, ordered bands

26 THRILLING WONDER STORIES

around the houses. There were steep streets
that rose in steps around the curves of the hill
upon which the town was based.

The roofs were steeply pitched, arguing a
heavy snowfall in winter, but each of them
had a landing area on the highest part of the
house, usually facing a low door let into a
gable. And Kern’s last doubt departed. This
was indeed a village of flying people. He had
come into his own world at last.

His content lasted about five minutes.

Then they came 1 down upon the brightly
tiled landing-roof of what, was probably the
townhall, and Kern, already fluttering his
wings for a landing, saw something that made
him instinctively tighten the chest-muscles
that controlled his wings so that they stiffened
into broad pinions again. He soared and made
a second circle about the rooftop.

The girl had reversed herself and was
reaching with one foot for a landing when she
saw what had startled him. She laughed and
looked up, beckoning through the cloud of
her settling hair.

Kern made a third circle, fighting the up-
draft among the houses while he looked down
dubiously at the two dead men sprawled upon
the roof. Both were young and both were
winged. The girl walked delicately by them
as if they were not there, settling her wings
precisely. She stepped over the pool of blood,
still liquid, that ran from a wound in the
nearer man’s neck, streaked across the width
of his quiet pinion, and that puddled the bril-
liant tiles with a color of even brighter hue.

There was a measured beating of the air
above Kem. and he looked up to see the
hunchback hovering on silky red wings above
him. Sunlight flashed on a bared knife-blade.
Gerd gestured down. And there was some-
thing about his poise in the air, the way he
handled his muscular, twisted body, that
warned Kem not to precipitate a struggle. It
occurred to him for the first time that fighting
in midair must be an art requiring skills he
had never learned — yet.

Gingerly he circled again and came down
very lightly at the edge of the roof, holding
his wings half-open until he was sure of his
footing. The girl was waiting for him. She
smiled, her blue glance flicking the dead men.
Then she slapped her own dagger significant-
ly, glanced at the bodies and back at Kern,
and with a careless beckoning motion turned
to enter the roof door.

A little dazed, Kern followed. Did she mean
she herself had killed them? What extraor-

dinary sort of culture had he found ready-
made for him here? The first doubts stirring
in his mind, he stooped his wings under the
door-frame and groped down a narrow, curv-
ing stairway behind the floating hair of his
guide. Behind him he heard Gerd’s feet
thump uncompromisingly from step to step.

Voices came up the stair-well as they de-
scended. At the bottom of the flight Kern
followed the girl into a big stone-paved room,
low-ceilinged, smoky from the fire that blazed
in a huge cavern of whitewashed brick at one
end of the roof.

The room was full of the living and the
dead. Bewildered, Kern glanced about at the
winged bodies which had obviously been
dragged carelessly out of the center of the
room and heaped against the walls. Blood lay
in coagulating pools here and there on the
flags. The men about the fireplace seemed to
be debating something in loud voices. They
looked up sharply as the girl entered. Then
there was a clattering rush and a clamor of
guttural voices as they hurried to greet her.

Kern made out one word among their sen-
tences that seemed to be her name.

“Elje — Elje!”

Their voices echoed under the low ceiling,
their wings made a rustle and soft clatter as
they shouldered together around her. If it
had not been for the unconsidered dead at
their feet, Kem would have been happy with-
out reservation, knowing at last beyond any
doubt that this was a world of the winged.

They were talking about him, obviously.
Elje, braiding her disordered hair, spoke rap-
idly and glanced from Kern to her compan-
ions and back again. Kern did not wholly like
the looks of the men. Without wings, they
would have seemed an undisciplined, violent
group. Their faces were scarred and weather-
beaten. All of them wore knives, and they
had clearly been in a hard fight within the
last few hours.

Among the dead on the floor there were
men without wings. There were also, he saw
now, a few women; some winged, some not.
Two races? Somehow he surmised that was
not true; there was a subtle likeness among
them all, the wingless and the winged, that
marked them of the same racial stock.

Presently he began to notice that the un-
winged were all either elderly or adolescent.
He remembered that his own wings had not
begun to grow until he was past eighteen.
Was it only in their prime that this race could
fly? And would he, with advancing years,

WAY OF THE GODS 21

lose again this glorious attribute he had only
now begun to enjoy?

T HE thought damped that surge of exul-
tation which still flooded his mind be-
neath the surface bewilderment. And then he
grinned wryly to himself, thinking:

“Maybe it won’t happen. Maybe I won’t
live that long!”

For the looks of the grim men around him
were not encouraging. If he had guessed right
about a universal language in this world, it
was not strange that his ignorance of it gave
them room for suspicion. And in a village
where life was held as cheaply as it was held
here, he could probably expect direct and
violent reactions to suspicion.

He was not far wrong. The men spoke
among themselves in brawling voices a mo-
ment or two longer, the girl Elje braiding her
hair carelessly and putting in a word now and
then. While Kern stood there, debating with
himself what was best to do, the argument
came to a swift climax. Elje called something
in a clear voice and, directly behind him,
Kern heard a guttural monosyllable in an-
swer, and the rustle of wings, and felt some-
thing cold and edged laid against the side of
his neck.

He stood quite still. Then the hunchback,
Gerd, sidled around into his view, holding the
sharp knife with a steady hand against Kern’s
jugular. The pale eyes in the dark young face
were steady and full of cold threat.

Someone moved across the flagstones be-
hind him and Kern felt hands draw his wrists
together, felt the roughness of rope pulled
tight around them. He did not protest. He
was too surprised, and too unaccustomed to
violence in his daily life, to know just now
what course he should take. And he was

filled still with the thought that these were
his own people.

A something heavy and clinging fell sud-
denly across his wings. He jumped and looked
back. It was a net, which a man with a
scarred face and suspicious, squinting eyes
was rapidly knotting' together at the base of
his pinions.

The hunchback grunted another monosyl-
lable and drove the point of his knife against
Kern’s shoulder, jerking his red head toward
a flight of stairs across the room. The winged
men drew back to let the two pass, silent now
and watching with impassive faces. Elje, fin-
ishing the last of the second braid, tossed the
pale silken rope of it across her shoulder and
would not meet Kern’s eyes as he went by.

The stairs twisted unevenly through nar-
row stone walls. At the third level the hunch-
back threw open a heavy, low door and fol-
lowed Kern into the room beyQnd. It was
rather a pleasant little place, circular, with
tile-banded walls and a tiled floor. The sin-
gle window was barred and looked out over
rooftops and distant hills. There was a low
bed, a table, two chairs, nothing more.

The hunchback pushed Kern roughly to-
ward one of the chairs. Both of them, Kern
noticed, had low backs to clear the wings of
those who might sit in them. He sank down
and looked at the red-winged man expectant-
ly. What happened then was the last thing,
perhaps, that he might have expected to hear.

Gerd held out his dagger, level across his
palm, pointed to it with the other hand and
growled, “Kaj.” He slapped his sheath then,
said, “Kajen,” and dropped the dagger into
it. His pale eyes bored into Kern’s.

Unexpectedly, Kern heard himself laugh-
ing. Partly it was relief, for he would not

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22 THRILLING WONDER STORIES

have been surprised to feel the edge of that
knife called kaj sink into his throat once the
door had closed behind them.

Instead, apparently this was to be a lesson
in language. , . .

Once, in the night, he awoke briefly.
Strange stars were shining through the bars
of his window. He thought there was some-
one stealthily looking at him from beyond the
bars, and sleepily realized that it would take
as great skill to fly in silence as to walk with-
out noise. But he saw no one. He slept again
and dreamed it was Elje at the window,
touching the bars with light fingertips as she
smiled in at him in the starlight, her face
dabbled with blood.

For two weeks he saw no one but Gerd.
The pale eyes in the dark face became very
familiar to him, and gradually the deep voice
became familiar and understandable too. Gerd
was a patient and indefatigable teacher, and
the language was a simple one, made for a
simple culture. Indeed, Kern learned it so
rapidly that he began to catch Gerd’s suspi-
cious sidelong glances, and once, from his
door, overheard a conversation on the stair
outside when Gerd and Elje met.

“I think he may be a spy,” the hunchback’s
deep guttural said.

Elje laughed. “A spy who doesn’t speak
our language?”

“He learns it too readily. I wonder, Elje —
The Mountain is cunning.”

“Hush,” was all she answered. But Kern
thereafter was careful to pretend he knew
less of the language than he really did.

The Mountain. He thought of that in the
long hours when he was alone. A mountain,
strange of shape, the color of clouds, tower-
ing halfway up the heavens. It was more than
inert matter, if these winged people spoke of
it with that hush in their voices.

For a fortnight he waited and listened and
learned. Once more, in the night, with the
nameless stars looking in at the window, he
felt that inexplicable stirring of , alien life
deep within him, and was frightened. It
passed quickly, and was gone too fast for him
to put any name to it, or to remember it
clearly afterward. Mutation? Continuing
change, in some unguessable form? He would
not think of it.

N THE fourteenth night, the Dream
came.

He had not thought very much about Bruce
Hallam. Kua and the others. Subconsciously,

he did not want to. This was his world and
the other mutants were actually intruders,
false notes in the harmony. Danger he might
find here, even death, but it was a winged
world, and his own.

There were dreams at night. Voices whis-
pering, whose tones he half-recognized and
would not allow himself to remember when
he awoke. Something was searching for his
soul.

Before that final contact on the fourteenth
night, he had eavesdropped enough on other
conversations held on the stairs between Gerd
and Elje to understand a little of what went
on around him.

Gerd was urging that they leave the town
and return somewhere, and Elje was
adamant.

“There’s no danger yet.”

“There is danger whenever we’re away
from the eyrie. Not even the Mountain can
guide enemies through the poison winds.
Our safety has always been a quick raid, Elje,
and then back to the eyrie. But to stay here,
gorging ourselves — in a town - — is madness.”

“I like the comfort here.” Elje said naively.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve eaten and
drunk so well, and slept on such a bed.”

“You’ll sleep on a harder bed soon, then,”
Gerd said dourly. “The towns will gather.
They must know already that we’re here.”

“Are we afraid of the townsmen?”

“When the Mountain walks — ” the hunch-
back said, and left the sentence unfinished.

Elje’s laughter rang false.

That night, Kern felt seeking fingers try
again the doors of his mind, and this time his
subconscious resistance could not keep them
out. He recognized the mind behind that
seeking — the infinitely sad, infinitely wise
mind of the mutant Byrna, with the lovely
voice and the pale, unlovely face.

For a moment he floundered, lost in the
depths of that intelligence so much more
fathomless than his own. For a moment time-
less sorrow washed him like the waters of
the sea. Then he found himself again, and
was looking, somehow, through new and dif-
ferent eyes, into a grassy hollow filled with
starlight. Into Kua’s beautiful honey-colored
face and her great single eye. Into Sam
Brewster’s veiled gaze.

Dimly he groped for Bruce Hallam, who
had opened the door for them all. Bruce was
missing. And as for Byrna — it was Byma’s
eyes through which he saw them. Her mind,
gripping his like the clasp of hands, cupping

WAY OF THE GODS 23

his like a bowl of still water. Soundlessly
through space came a voice. Kua’s voice.
“Byrna, have you found him?”

“I think — yes. Kern! Kern!”

Without words, he answered them.

“Yes, Kus . Yes, Byrna. I’m here.”

There was resentment in Kua’s voice — the
voice of her mind, for no words were spoken
in this curious seance. Kern found time to
wonder briefly if Byrna had always possessed
this strange ability to bridge distances, or if
it had burgeoned in her here as something
struggled in himself for new being.

“We’ve been trying a long time, Kern,”
Kua said coldly. “You were hard to reach.”
“I — I wasn’t sure you’d be here any longer.”
“You thought we’d have gone on to other
worlds. Well, we would have, if we could.
But Bruce was hurt. In the storm.”
“Badly?”

She hesitated. “We — can’t be sure. Look.”
Through Byrna’s eyes Kern saw Bruce
Hallam’s motionless figure, lying silent on a
bed of boughs. He looked oddly pale, almost
ivory in color. His breathing was nearly im-
perceptible. And Byma’s mind, groping
through the void for his, found only a
strange, dim spinning — something too far
away and too abstract for the normal mind to
grasp. She touched it briefly — and it spun
out of contact and was gone.

“A trance?” Kua said. “We don’t know, yet.
But we’ve used Byrna’s vision and learned a
little about this world. How much do you
know, Kern?”

Kern told them then, with Byrna’s tongue,
too absorbed in the needs of the moment to
realize fully what a strange meeting this was
of more than human minds, over unguessed
distances of alien land. He told them what he
knew, what he had guessed from overheard
conversations — not much, but a general pic-
ture.

“The planet’s mostly ocean. A small con-
tinent, about the size of Australia, I think.
City-states all over it. Elje’s band are outlaws.
They have a hideout somewhere, and they
raid the towns. They seem — well, scornful of
the townspeople, and a little afraid, too. I
can’t quite understand that.”

“This — Gerd? He spoke of a Mountain?”
Kua said.

“Yes. Something about — when the Moun-
tain walks.”

“You know the Mountain,” Kua said. “The
storm came from there. Those vortices of
light and energy rose out of it.”

M ERN remembered the spindles of blind-
ing brilliance that strode across the
land in the maelstrom of the winds. “We
don’t understand much of it yet,” Kua was
saying in a troubled tone. We know there’s
danger connected with that Mountain. I think
there is life there, something we don’t know
about. Something that probably couldn’t have
developed on Earth. The conditions could
have been too alien. But here anything is
possible.”

Kern felt the thought forming in his brain
— in Byrna’s brain.

“Life? Intelligent life? What do you know
about it?”

“Maybe not life as we understand the word.
Call it a — force. No, it’s more tangible thin
that. I don’t know—” The thought-voice of
Kua faltered. “Dangerous. We may learn
more of it, if we live. This much we’ve seen,
though, through Byrna’s vision, and mine.
We’ve sensed forces reaching out from the
Mountain, into the minds of men. The minds
of the winged townspeople. Assembling them
for war.” She hesitated. “Kern, do you know
they’re on their way now, to your town,
where the outlaws are?”

He was instantly alert. ,

“Now? From where? Flow soon can they
get here?”

“I’m not sure. They aren’t in my sight yet
— over the horizon, that is. Byrna, tell him.”
The mind that held Kern’s stirred, and
through it he saw as through a haze rank
upon rank of winged beings flying with
steady beasts of their pinions over a dark
night-time terrain. Byma’s thought mur-
mured,

“You see, I can’t tell how far. It’s new,
this clairvoyance since we came from Earth.
I could always see but not so clearly, and
I never could show others what was in my
mind. So I only know these men are flying
against your village.”

“And the force of men — the Mountain, I
think, has armed them somehow,” Kua put
in. “Byrna has seen the weapons they carry.
You’d better warn your friends — your jailers
or whatever they are. Otherwise you may be
caught in the middle of a fight.”

“I will.” Kern’s mind was full now of
something new. “You say you’ve developed
this clairvoyance since the time when you
came here, Byrna. Has it happened to the
others, too?”

“To me, maybe, a little,” Kua said slowly.
“A sharpening of focus, not much more than

THRILLING WONDER STORIES

that. To Sam—” Her thought form glanced
sidewise to Sam Brewster, sitting silent, with
the hood of his secondary lids drawn over his
terrible eyes, “ — I think nothing’s happened.
He can’t join our talk now, you see. Byrna’s
mind can’t reach into his at all. We’ll have to
tell him all that’s been said, later. And
Bruce.” She shrugged. “Perhaps the winged
people will tell you how we can help him.
The edge of one of the vortices caught him,
and he’s been like this ever since. We’d hoped
to go on, you know, Kern, to find our own
tvorlds as you- — perhaps — have found yours.
But without Bruce, we’re helpless.”

Kern was aware of a tightening and
strengthening of his own mind as a problem
at last came before him that must be met.
Until now he had been almost in a trance of
wonder and delight and dismay at the new
things of this new, winged world. But the
time for lassitude was over. He gathered his
thoughts for speech, but Kua’s voice cut his
beginning phrases short.

“Kern, there’s danger in the Mountain. The
—thing — whatever it is, knows we’re here.
It lives in the Mountain, or perhaps it is the
Mountain. But Byrna has sensed hatred from
it. Malevolence.”

There was a sudden harshness to her
thought.

“Kern, you’re a soft fool!” Kua said. “Did
you think you could reach Paradise without
earning it? W'hether you help us or not,
you’ve got to face danger before you’ll find
your place in this world, or any other. I
don’t think you can manage without us. And
we need your help, too. Together, we may
still lose the battle. Separately, there’s no
hope for any of us. We know! The Mountain
may be a mutation as far beyond us as we
are beyond the animals. But we’ve got to
fight.”

Her voice blurred suddenly, faded to a thin
drone. The starlit hill and the faces before
him swirled and melted in Kern’s sleeping
sight. He struggled for a moment against in-
tangible danger — something formless and full
of strong malevolence. He saw — what was it?
A vast, coiling Something like a ribbon of fire,
moving lazily in darkness and aware of him —
terribly aware.

Far off in the void he felt the quiver of
fright in a mind he knew — Byrna’s mind. But
he lost the contact instantly, and then some-
one was shaking him by the shoulder and
saying something in insistent, guttural tones.

He opened his eyes.

CHAPTER IV
Evil Mountain

ffN HIS vision, the coiling flame had left
jit so brilliant an image upon his eyelids
that for an instant he could see nothing but
the blue-green scar of after-sight swimming
upon his vision. Then that faded and he was
staring up into Gerd’s darkly handsome
young face.

Kern struggled to sit up, beating his wings
a little to help him rise. The gust stirred
Kern’s red hair and sent motes dancing in
the beam of sunlight falling across the bed.
Kern in the aftermath of amazement and
terror forgot to dissemble his knowledge of
the winged men’s tongue. The simple syl-
lables raced off his lips.

“Gerd, Gerd, you’ve got to listen to me!
I’ve been finding out things I didn’t suspect
until now. Let me up. The townspeople are
coming!”

Gerd put a hard palm against his chest.

“Not so fast. You seem to have learned our
language in your sleep. No, stay there.” His
voice rose. “Elje!”

She was a moment or two in coming, and
Gerd stood back with his hand on his dagger
and his pale, suspicious eyes unswerving as
he watched Kern. When Elje came, bright-
faced in the morning sun, her ashen braids
wound in a coronet that glistened against the
high arch of her wings, he spoke without
taking his eyes from Kern.

“Our guest awoke this morning with a
strangely fluent knowledge of speech. I told
you before of the danger from spies, Elje.”

“All right, I do know more of your lan-
guage than I pretended,” Kern admitted. “I
just learned it faster than you believed, that’s
all. That doesn’t matter now. Do you know
the townspeople are coming to attack?”

Gerd bent forward swiftly, half-open wings
hovering above him in the sunlight.

“How do you know that? You are a spy!”

“Let him talk, Gerd,” Elje said. “Let him
talk.”

Kern talked. . . .

In the end, he could see that they did not
yet fully trust him. It was not surprising, for
the tale would have bewildered anyone. But
the prospect of an advancing army was
enough to divide their thoughts.

“If I were a spy, would I warn you they

WAY OF THE GODS 25

were coming?” Kern demanded, seeing their
dubious glances fixed on him at the end of

his story.

“It isn’t the army you’d be spying for,”
Gerd said reluctantly.

“Your other world — Earth,” Elje mur-
mured, her eyes searching Kern’s. “If that
were true, it could explain some things. But
we know of no other worlds.”

Briefly Kern thought that it might be easier
for one of Elje’s culture to believe in the
existence of other worlds than for a denizen
of some more sophisticated civilization. The
people of this winged race had not yet closed
their minds to all they could not see. It was
not a race so sure of its own omnipotence
that it denied all unfamiliar things existence.

“How could I hurt you now?” Kern said.
“Why should I warn you, if I were on their
side?”

“It’s the Mountain,” Elje said surprisingly.
“Why do you suppose we kept you here in
this bare room, without furnishings, without
anything you could build into a weapon? Or
do you know?”

Bewildered, he shook his head.

“We were not sure if you were a slave to
the Mountain. If you were, a coil of wire, a
bit of iron — -anything — would have been
dangerous to us in your hands.” Her eyes
were questioning.

Again Kern shook his head. Gerd began to
speak, his voice faintly derisive.

“A long story and an evil one. Perhaps you
know it. At any rate, we’re the only free
people in this world. Oh, there may be a few
others, but not many, and they don’t live long.
The Mountain is jealous of its slaves. Aside
from our group, all the rest of mankind be-
longs to the Mountain. All!”

“This Mountain?” Kern said. “What is it?”
Gerd shrugged his red wings.

“Who knows? Demon — god. If we ever
had a history, no one knows it now. No
legend goes back beyond the coming of the
Mountain. We only know that it has always
been there, and from it, whispers float out to
men in their sleep, and they become slaves
to the whisper. Something happens in their
minds. For the most part they live as they
choose, in their cities. But sometimes that
voice comes again, and then they’re mindless,
doing as the Mountain bids them.”

“W r e don’t know what the Mountain is,”
Elje said. “But we know that it’s intelligent.
It can guide men’s hands to make weapons,
when there’s a need for weapons. And it can

send out storms, such as the one in which we
found you. Not for a long, long while has
there been a storm out of the Mountain. If
you’re not a spy, how do you explain the fact
that your coming and the storm happened in
the same hour?”

HE SHRUGGED. About that, he also was
U puzzled,

“I wish I knew. But I’ll find out, if any
human can. Do you mean the army that’s
coming against you is sent by the Mountain?
Why?”

“As long as we remain free, the Mountain
will try to enslave us,” Elje said. “And we’ll
fight the townsmen for the things we need,
since we don’t dare fight the Mountain. We’ve
stayed too long in this village — yes, Gerd, I
know! We’ll return to the eyrie now. If an
army of the townsfolk is coming, they’ll have
weapons the Mountain made them build, and
the weapons will be dangerous, whatever
they may be this time.”

“The prisoner may know all this already,”
Gerd said dourly. “That doesn’t matter. But
it will matter if we take him to the eyrie. He
could lead our enemies there, Elje.”

“Through the poison winds?” But Elje
drew in her lower lip thoughtfully. “He tells
a mad story, Gerd. I know that. Could it be
true?”

“Well, what then?”

“These companions he spoke of. They
sound like gods. And they talked of fighting
against the Mountain.”

“Fight against the stars,” Gerd said and
laughed. “But not the Mountain. Not even
gods could win such a war.”

“They aren’t gods,” Kern said. “But they
have powers none of us know. I think our
coming marks a turning place in the history
of your race, 'Elje — Gerd. You can kill us or
abandon us and go on as you always have, or
you can believe me and help us, and fight
this time with a chance of winning. Will you
do it?”

Elje was silent for a moment. Then she
laughed and stood up suddenly with a flutter
of her wings.

“I’ll go along with you and talk to your
friends,” she said. “If they’re as you say — yes,
Kern, I’ll believe you. For the Mountain nev-
er has changed human flesh. It can touch our
minds, but not our bodies. I think in the be-
ginning were men whose brains had some
weakness that let the whisper come in, and
those men were armed by the Mountain and

28 THRILLING WONDER STORIES

killed their fellows, until only we outlaws
remained.

“Our minds over the generations have been
bred to resist invasion as the townspeople
were bred to welcome it. I think — I know — if
the Mountain could reach into our bodies and
make that tiny change that would open our
mind to it, then it would win. But it can’t. It
can’t alter our bodies except by killing us. If
I see with my own eyes these companions of
Kern’s, I’ll know there is a power greater
than the Mountain. And we’ll fight together,
Kern!”

A little later, floating high above the nest
of hills which cradled the village, Kern
rocked on spread wings and pressed his eyes
tightly shut, thinking with all the strength
of his mind:

“Byrna, Byrna! Answer me, Byrna! Help
me find you. Byrna, do you hear?”

Silence, except for the small noises drifting
up from far below, distant shouts as Elje’s
winged band collected in haste the loot they
would take with them to their eyrie. Kern’s
vision swam with the flecked clouds of sun-
light on closed lids. Deliberately he blanked
his mind to receive an answer. None came.

“Byrna! There may not be time to waste.
Byrna, Kua, answer me!”

In his eagerness and impatience he re-
membered again what he had glimpsed dimly
through Byrna’s memory, the ranks of armed
fliers moving through the night on steadily
beating wings toward the village. Perhaps
from so far away they would not arrive for
many hours — perhaps so near that the cloud
on the horizon now was not mist, but armed
men. . . .

“Byrna! Do you hear me?”

“Kern!” The answer he sought came with
sharp impact, like a blow in the face. As if
she were almost at his side and speaking with
dreadful violence. He caught terror in the
contact of minds, cold, controlled terror that
chilled him so the sunny air turned suddenly
icy around him. He knew instantly that she
had heard him before, had been hedging for
just the right contact so that there need be no
wasted moments of groping and finding focus
upon one another. He caught the hard impact
and the terror and the urgency in the moment
their minds met. Then her thoughts tumbled
into his mind:

“Kern! Hurry! No time to waste. Do you
see the grove of blooming' trees left on the
horizon? Come! Make new contact there.”

She blanked as suddenly as she had en-

tered his mind. And because thoughts are so
infinitely more rapid than words she had con-
veyed those four ideas — identification, haste,
locality and a promise of future contact— in
almost no lapse of time at all. But in that
brief instant while their minds did meet,
something happened.

Kern rocked on shaken wings as if a blow
had jolted him. He snatched his mind back
from the brief touch with Byrna’s quickly,
quickly, scorched with the incandescent ha-
tred that had blazed in the void between

them. For the coiled ribbon of fire which had
swum so strangely through nothingness when
he woke from his clairvoyant dream was
awake and alive now, and terribly avid.

WT HAD been waiting, he knew in the in-
Bi stant while his mind leaped back in re-
coil from that burning contact. It had found
them as he waked slowly from the long,
leisured conversation in the seance.

Since that moment it had lain, coiled, in
waiting. It?

Folding his wings, he dropped forward in
a long, breathtaking dive, the air screaming
past his ears. From a tiled rooftop far below,
he saw two figures rise, one on pale wings,
one on glossy red. He spread his own pinions

then, exulting in the strain on his chest-
muscles when the broad surfaces checked his
dive, bore him up in a steep arc that made
the air feel warm and solid as he carved a
long curve through it.

“That way,” he told Elje. pointing, when
she rose within hearing. “We’ll have to hurry.
There’s something wrong. I think perhaps the
Mountain, or Something in the Mountain,
knows we’re here.”

Elje’s clear bright color blanched in the
sunlight. Behind her, Gerd’s eyes flashed side-
ward in the dark face, suspicious, mistrusting
still.

“Why do you say that?”

Kern told them as they flew, the grove of
blossoming trees on the horizon seeming to
slip rapidly down the edge of the skyline and
draw nearer far below. It was not easy to
talk and fly. Kern’s breath began to come
fast, and his chest and wings ached with the
speed, after so many days of inactivity. When
he finished speaking there was silence.

“The eyrie lies that way.” Elje said pres-
ently, in a controlled voice. She pointed right
with a smooth bare arm. “I’ve sent most of
the men on with our loot. Cerd chose twenty
to follow us. You don’t know where or how

WAY OF THE GODS 27

far the Mountain’s men are?”

Kern shook his head. “Maybe I can find
out at the next meeting with Byrna.”

He glanced behind them and saw the little
band of Elje’s bodyguard flying a few minutes
in their rear, big men all of them, with stolid,
hard-eyed faces. Several carried light wicker
squares looped up with straps.

“Seats for your friends, Kern,” Elje ex-
plained. “We need them when we carry our
young people or our old ones, who no longer
have the power to fly.” Her face darkened,
as Kern knew their faces always did when
the winged people thought of the days in
which they would no longer travel the lanes
of air.

It occurred to him then that their battles
might be ferocious things, fought by men as
fanatic in their own way as those who
fought on Earth for entry into an imagined
paradise. For these men fought their own old
age as surely as they fought an enemy. No
one who has once spread wings upon the air-
currents willingly faces a life without wings.

The blooming grove was beneath them now.

“If you make contact this time with — it —
again, Kern, I think it will know more easily
where to direct its men,” Elje said. “There is
great danger. Will you let this meeting with
your friends go for awhile? You may be do-
ing them harm as well as us. The army of the
Mountain may be very near now.”

Kern hesitated. He had been dreading with
every wingbeat the moment when he must
open his mind again to that coiled and scorch-
ing malevolence. For an instant he toyed with
the idea of postponing searching for Bju-na’s
mind, but he knew it would only mean put-
ting off the inevitable. Grimly he shook his
head,

“Byrna!” he called out mentally. “Byrna,
what next?”

As before, for long moments there was no
answer. Then briefly, like a gasp, he caught
the touch of Byrna’s mind — only briefly and
very incoherently, because between them in
the instant of contact flashed the blinding
hatred of the — the interloper. Only when
their minds touched, apparently, could the
white-hot malevolence reach them, but it lay
ambushed and ready, and this time it seemed
to flare out between them almost before
Byrna’s voice could speak.

Reeling back, shaken and stunned by the
thing between them, Kern caught only a
ragged thought or two from Byrna’s mind.

“Three hills — hurry — army!”

That was all that got through. For an in-
stant the void flamed with the blankness of
sheer hatred. Then Kern opened his eyes and
caught himself on reeling wings. Elje and
Gerd watched him without speaking as he
controlled his shaken faculties with a great
effort. Elje was white with terror, but on
Gerd’s face suspicion was still predominant.

Three hills in a shadowy row cut the hori-
zon line. Kern gestured toward them and in
silence the little group flew on. If Byrna’s
gasp of “ — army — ” meant the enemy were
nearly upon them, there was nothing to do
except fly as they had been flying, in the hope
of reaching the mutants before disaster over-
took them all.

CHAPTER V

Pursuit

T HE three hills were not quite below
them, and Kern was watching the skyline
anxiously for signs of the winged army which
was moving against them, when something
from below flashed across his eyes. He
blinked and looked down. From a clump of
trees the light-beam flashed again, dazzlingly,
from a tiny point of brilliance. Then a small
figure stepped out from the shelter of the
branches, waving at him.

It was Kua. Even from this height he could
see the reflected light in twin points on the
sun-glasses she held in one hand. She had
signalled him by the heliograph with the only
thing they had for reflecting light.

Pointing downward, he let one wing tilt
high and came about in a long glide, lying
at full length upon the air with his heels
higher than his head. The ground swung like
water in a cup and Kua seemed to rush up-
ward to meet him as the swift dive cut the
space between them.

The others were with her by the time Kern
had put his feet to the grass. He was con-
scious, as always, of a little shock of memory
renewed when he met again Kua’s great
single gaze from the center of her forehead.
Byrna, hurrying to meet him, lifted a pale,
drawn little face.

“Kern!” she cried in a voice that was pure
music. And he thought there was in her eyes,
and in Kua’s, a subtle something that was
new to him. Mutation had gone on, perhaps,
with them as with him, a step beyond Earthly

n THRILLING WONDER STORIES

mutation. Their powers were strengthened,
so that, in part, they both were strangers to
him.

Sam Brewster came out smiling and ex-
tending his hand, and Kern took it with the
little inward quailing he had always felt be-
fore Sam, the instinctive averting of his gaze
from Sam’s veiled eyes. Beyond Sam’s
shoulder he saw Bruce Hallam lying mo-
tionless, as if he had not stirred since they
laid him on the pallet of boughs. His face
was ivory-hard and as withdrawn from liv-
ing as the face of a statue that had never
known life.

Everything was confused for a few mo-
ments. Byrna was crying, “Hurry, hurry!”
and Kua’s distance-piercing glance kept
sweeping the horizon as the winged people
swooped to the ground behind Kern and came
forward swiftly, wings half open to speed
their hurrying feet.

Kern heard Elje’s little gasp of incredulity
and dismay when Kua’s blue central eye
turned upon the newcomers, but the winged
girl was too good a commander to waste time
after that first glance which confirmed what
Kern had told her.

In a matter of seconds they were in the air.

Bruce Hallam, still motionless in his mys-
terious slumber, had been swung on a wicker
carrier between two burly fliers. The other
three mutants, in their seats between winged
bearers, scarcely had time for amazement or
uncertainty as they were wafted aloft.

Kern, flying with the rest over the rolling
hilltops with the vast glass cloud of the
Mountain shadowing the horizon, timed his
flight to the pace of the slowest so that he
might talk in midair with the wingless people
in the carriers. And close beside him Elje
and Gerd hovered, watching almost jealously
every expression on the faces of the speak-
ers.

“What do they say, Kern?” Elje asked
breathlessly, timing her words to the rhythm
of her wings. “Are — are you sure these
people are human? I never saw such — such —
creatures. Gerd, after all could they be
gods?”

Gerd laughed shortly, but there was un-
easiness in his voice.

“Let them talk. Is the enemy near yet?
Ask them, Kern.”

“Near, I think,” Byrna said. She was
clutching the straps of her swaying chair with
both tiny hands and her incredibly musical
voice might have been crooning a song in-

stead of shaping the syllables of terror which
echoed the look in her eyes. “Kern, I don’t
dare — look — for them any more! You saw
what happened! Kern, tell me what it was
you saw.

“I? Fire, I think. A coiling ribbon of it—
and hate. I could almost see the hate!”

“Tlie Mountain,” Byrna said, her eyes
turning automatically toward the great cloud
hanging ominously in the sky. “What do you
know about it, Kern? Have these people told
you?”

Briefly he gave her the story Elje had re-
counted.

“It has never yet been able to change
people physically, or there wouldn’t be any
outlaws left.” he finished. “At least, so Elje
thinks. Byrna, I wonder if it could change
us? We’re malleable — abnormally malleable.
I—”

He hesitated. Not even to Byrna did he
yet want to speak of the deep, mysterious
stirrings he had felt in his own flesh.

“You think you and Kua may have felt
something like a changing in yourselves?”

Byrna nodded, her eyes wide and dis-
tressed. “We can’t tell how much, yet. May-
be the Mountain is the cause of it.”

Unexpectedly Sam Brewster, swinging be-
tween his carriers above Byrna, leaned for-
ward.

“The Mountain’s where the answer is,
Kern. I don’t think we’ll be safe until we’ve
explored it.”

“Safe!” Kern said grimly. “If you’d seen
what I have, you’d never talk that way.”

“It won’t matter,” Kua called from a little
way ahead, twisting in her seat to send a
piercing blue gaze back at them. “Look!
They’re coming!”

ERN’S sharp exclamation as he banked
swiftly and turned to follow her point-
ing finger was explanation enough to Elje and
Gerd what was happening. A shiver of ex-
citement ran through the whole flying group,
a tightening of muscle and mind. For an in-
stant their pace slackened, simultaneously,
without signal, almost as a flight of birds
wheels simultaneously at no perceptible mes-
sage.

There was nothing visible on the horizon
where Kua pointed.

“I can see the first of them — a long line,”
she said. “They’re carrying something, but
I’m not sure what it is. Round things — nets
of something shining, like thin wire. Light’s

WAY OF THE GODS 29

flashing from it when the sun hits them.”

Rapidly Kern told Elje.

“New weapons,” she said. “I expected that.
I wonder — well, we’ll know soon enough.”
She beat her wings together and soared sud-
denly above the group, looking down with
speculative eyes.

“We’re going too slowly. Kern.” She
flashed a glance at him. “This other friend
of yours, the injured one. He’s heavy. He
slows us. And he takes two men out of the
fight if we’re caught. I think — ” She made an
expressive downward gesture.

“No!” Kern said quickly. “He’s the most
powerful of us all, if we can rouse him.”

“Well, he must be first to fall, if the need
comes.” Elje said. “But we’ll wait.” She
called commands to the group flying before
them, and eight men wheeled in the air and
swung back. Kern watched them slip smooth-
ly, without a break in their wing-beats, into
the harness of the wicker carriers, relieving
those who had borne the burden this far.

“Now, quickly!” Elje said. “The eyrie!”

They were almost over the jagged hills
where the outlaws’ refuge lay, when the first
ranks of the enemy swept over the skyline
and saw them. The fugitives had flown low,
taking advantage of every line of hills and
trees for cover, and despite their burden they
flew fast, their pace nearly matching that of
the pursuers because of the all-night flight
the enemy had made.

But they had not yet reached shelter when
the sound of a horn, clear and high, fell
through the sunny air, and after it, drowning
out the thin, sweet notes, the roar of angl-y
men sighting their prey.

Elje was very calm.

“Gerd,” she said. “You’ll lead the way in?”

“No!” he growled. “Let one of the captains
go. I feel like a fight.”

“Stay, then,” Elje answered.

She called a command to a man in the front
rank of her little party. They were flying as
fast as wing could carry them toward a gap
between two jagged, dark hills through which
Kern could see a wilderness of tortured rock
beyond. It looked volcanic in origin, and
waves of intermittent heat and strange metal-
lic odors drifted to them on the wind as they
approached.

“There are poisonous currents in these
hills,” Elje told Kern as they swept forward.
“Many of us died before we learned the way
through them. Now we have a shelter where
no one can follow us who hasn’t a guide.”

Abruptly she ceased to speak. Kern turned
a startled glance and saw her reel in midair,
throwing back her head so that the clear line
of her throat was white and taut against the
blue sky. Then, without a word, suddenly
she crumpled in full flight. An instant longer
her wings sustained her and she hung limp
from the spread pinions. Then they too folded
back and she dropped like a stone.

Time stopped for Kern. Everything stood
still, the hills with their floating vapors, the
flying troupe, the breeze halted among the
trees below. He could see the first ranks of
the oncoming enemy halted too and hanging
motionless in space, their shouts nothing but
a buzz in his eai'S.

He saw too, very clearly, the great ovals of
the weapons they carried, and the light that
whirled in intricate, thin patterns like wires
of brilliance within the ovals. He saw the
cone of light reach out from the nearest oval
and touch another of the fugitive fliers.

It had happened in an instant, and it was
over. Kern dived for Elje’s falling body al-
most before she had ceased to speak, swung
under her, caught her across his arms in a
welter of slack wings and loosened hair.

Gerd’s harsh voice was shouting orders
above him. By the time Kern had labored up
to their level with his burden he saw the
newly-appointed guide of the winged men
vanishing into the cleft between the hills,
leading two by two the harnessed pairs who
carried the mutants.

The roar of savage voices behind them filled
the shaken air, . and the roar of countless
wings beating in ranks as the enemy swooped
upon them. They were very near now — so
near Kern could see the distorted, shouting
faces and the flash of knives in the hands of
the foremost.

It was a strange and eerie thing to realize
that no human hatred burned behind the
angry faces, but the fiery, venomed malig-
nancy which was the Mountain. Or did this
oncoming rabble know why it fought? Did
they think this fury their own emotion, not
a monstrously inspired rage that turned them
to automatons?

A cone of light swung past Kern, numbing
his wing-tip, and touched a fast-flying man in
front of him between the wings. The man
jolted convulsively, arched backward and
then crumpled to hang for an instant motion-
less on the momentum of his own flight. The
wings folded as Elje’s had done, and the man
dropped downward out of sight.

SO THRILLING WONDER STORIES

ERD was gesturing Kern frantically on.
The hunchback hovered on red pinions
recklessly in full view of the enemy, knives
flashing in each hand, ready to engage who-
ever came within reach of his blades. He was
shouting hoarse orders scarcely audible above
the rushing thunder of the enemies’ wings
and their voices bellowing for blood.

The last of the little band was pouring
through the hill-cleft now, Kern almost the
last of all with his limp burden hanging across
his arms. The air was full of twisting vapors
and he could not see very clearly as he swept
closer to the hills. It was, curiously, a night-
mare sensation, half-blindness from the poi-
son vapors and half- deafness from the roar
of wings and voices. He could only follow the
back of the man ahead, dimly seen through
the mists. Elie hung motionless in his arms,
her trailing wings fluttering a little to the
measured beat of his own.

The last thing he saw as he glanced back
was Gerd poised above the cleft to follow him
in, ready to fight a rear-guard action if need
be. And then, all in one brief glance between
drifts of vapor, Kern’s heart contracted as he
saw two more winged shapes beating desper-
ately toward him through the dimness, two
men flying tandem with a harnessed burden
between them.

It was Bruce Hallam’s bearers. And Elje
had been right. Bruce’s weight was too great
for the flying men to carry fast enough. Evi-
dently they had been left too far behind to
follow the other bearers in and had only now
made up the distance which would save them.

Or would it save them?

In spite of himself, Kern tilted his wings
and hesitated in the air, twisting his head to
watch. He saw' Gerd gesturing savagely to
hurry them in — heard the hunchback’s deep
howl.

“Drop him!” Gerd howled. “Drop him and
come on!”

But before they could obey, a cone of white
fire swept silently through the coiling fog and
enveloped bearers and burden alike in a bath
of radiance.

There was no sound, except for the all-en-
compassing uproar of the pursuit. In silence
the doomed fliers stiffened and glided an in-
stant still carrying their fatal weight between
them — and then dropped.

The three of them vanished together into
the engulfing mists.

Kern flew on with Elje.

He labored on leaden wings through the fog.

Whiffs of burning vapor stung in his nostrils
and set his pumping lungs on fire. Elje was an
almost unbearable weight in his arms.

Coughing, choking, ready to think every
wing-beat his last, he stumbled through the
air in the wake of the man before him, his
only guide through this aerial labyrinth of
poison. Hot updrafts caught him and tossed
him aloft, cross-currents fetid with strangling
vapors sent him into perilous side-slips
toward the jagged black peaks dangerously
near. At this speed he knew he could not
survive the slightest contact with those knife-
edged rocks.

And Bruce’s loss was a heavier burden to
bear than even Elje’s dead weight. For only
Bruce could have opened the doors for the
rest to escape into worlds of their own. And
upon Bruce’s uncanny skill he had pinned his
highest hopes of freeing this world from its
enemy.

Strangling, choking, muscles aching from
the strain of long flight, he reeled on in the
wake of the flying outlaws.

The end of the ordeal came without warn-
ing. One moment he was flying blindly
through the updrafts and the smoke, the next
he found himself floating in clear still air
over what seemed a great lip of rock. Winged
men below gestured him down and he
dropped slowly on aching wings and let his
feet touch the rock gingerly.

Elje coughed in his arms as he shifted
weight from wings to feet. Electrified, he
looked down, forgetting everything else in
this new surprise. He had been certain she
was dead or dying. She opened her eyes,
looked at him blindly, and let the lashes
flutter down again. But at least she was still
alive.

The men of her band closed around them
then and one of them took Elje from his arms.
Kern looked around curiously as he followed
Elje’s bearer across the rock.

A cavern lifted its high arched entrance be-
fore them, black rock without and within,
and the lip of rock thrust out before it, black
too. Above the platform, which must have
been two hundred feet across, the air was
still and no poisonous vapors swirled, but
they still rose all around the edges of the rock
and leaned together high above like a tent
roof that blotted out the sky except for oc-
casional rifts far overhead. It was like a
painter’s concept of Hades, even to the winged
men with the hard, violent faces swarming
out to meet the newcomers.

WAY OF THE GODS 31

The mutants were among them. Kern told
them shortly of Bruce’s loss. He did not want
to dwell on it, for it seemed a death-blow
to the hopes of the others and perhaps to his
own, too, if this world was ever to be peopled
by any but automatons.

None of the mutants spoke after he had
told them. The loss was a stunning one and
Byrna’s sad, small face grew sadder and very
pale, while Kua’s great blue eye filled with
tears as she turned away. Sam Brewster
muttered something under his breath and for
an instant Kern saw the veiling secondary
lids twitch across his eyes, as they always
twitched when Sam was angry, in involun-
tary preparation to draw back.

“Sam!” Kern said sharply. Sam grimaced
and turned away too, closing the secondary
lids again.

Inside the cavern, on a straw mattress un-
der a stretched crimson tent, Elje was lying.
A fire burned in a crude hood of rocks, its
heat cupped in the red tent and reflected back
again upon the bed. Someone was holding a
bowl of steaming liquid to her lips as Kern
came up.

Kern watched her drain it slowly. When
she lay back upon the cushions her eyes re-
mained open and she looked around the circle
of watching men with understanding dawning
in her face. Color came back into it after
awhile, and then she coughed again and sat
up.

“All right,” she said. “I’m better. What
happened?”

Kern told her.

“Gerd?” she asked when he had finished.
The men looked at one another inquiringly.
A growl of dissent went through the cavern.
No one had seen him. Someone rose on heavy
wings and flapped out under the dome to

search the platform outside. Gerd was not to
be found. Elje’s face darkened.

“We could afford to lose twenty men better
than Gerd,” she said. “You say he was last
behind you, Kern? Didn’t you hear any
fighting as you came in?”

Kern shook his head. “I couldn’t tell. I
thought he was following me. The last I saw
was Bruce and his carriers going down.”

LJE bit her lip. “I’m sorry. We’ll miss
IB 1-1 him. He was one of the bravest and
most loyal of us all. He’s been with us only
a year, but I’d come to depend more on his
judgment than — ” She broke off. “Well, it
can’t be helped. I suppose the light-cones got
him. I wonder how they work.” She flexed
her wings and tried her muscles out ex-
perimentally. “The rays don’t seem to leave
any after-effects. I suppose the fatalities are
meant to come from the fall. Well, at least
we’re lucky to have got away without any
worse losses.”

She got to her feet and shook her head
tentatively, shook her wings out and made
two or three uncertain beats that nearly lifted
her off the floor.

“I’m all right now.” She spread her hands
to the blaze for it was damply chill in the
cavern. “The Mountain’s angry,” she said.
“It isn’t only our raid on the village that
brought this army out against us. There was
that storm, too. Kern, I think the Mountain
knows you’re here and is trying to — to finish
you. Have you any idea why?”

Kern had, vague theories too inchoate to
put into words. He shook his head instead.
Elje laughed shortly.

“Gerd wouldn’t trust you. If he were here,
he’d say it was your fault the enemy had

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32 THRILLING WONDER STORIES

gathered against us. He’d say to put you out
and let you shift for yourselves, all of you.
Is there any reason why I shouldn’t?” Her
voice was suddenly hard.

Disconcerted, Kern stared at her. “If you
don’t know any — ” he began, but she broke
in quickly.

“You saved my life,” she conceded, “but
we’re not a sentimental people. We can’t
afford to be. If your presence here is a
menace to the safety of us all, I can’t indulge
my own gratitude by putting my men in
danger. We must- each contribute to the
strength of the group, or perish.” She
shrugged. “You’re one extra fighting man,
but what about your friends? Have they abili-
ties to counterbalance their being earth-
bound?”

“I think they have. This much is sure, Elje.
Unless we can prevail against the Mountain
somehow, I believe we mutants at least are
doomed. Our coming has upset the balance
in your world and the Mountain knows it and
intends to be rid of us. Well, we’ve lost our
best man, Bruce Hallam. With his help we
might have moved openly against the Moun-
tain. Without him, we are greatly handi-
capped.” Kern grimaced wryly. “Remember,
Byrna and I have been in — call it in tune —
with whatever it is that constitutes the Moun-
tain. We know what we’re facing. But I don’t
see any choice. It’s kill or be killed.”

Behind him Kua’s gentle voice spoke.
“Kern,” she said. He turned. Elje turned too,
and from the corner of his eye, he saw her
recoil involuntarily from the strangeness of
Kua’s face.

Kua’s wide blue eye, with depth upon
depth shining in it, was staring at the rock
wall above the fireplace. Her face had a look
of concentration and withdrawal upon it, as
if in all but body she were miles away.

“Kern!” she said again. “There are men
coming. Many men. I think they are the
same ones who were following us outside.”
She hesitated, glancing quickly at Elje’s face,
her eye refocusing swiftly and then going
back to the solid wall.

“Kua, you can see them?” Kern demanded.
“Do you mean it? Do you know you’re not
looking through empty spaces now, Kua?
You’re looking through rock!”

The shock of realization on Kua’s face as
she turned to him was answer enough. “I
am!” she gasped. “It never — that hasn’t hap-
pened before. Kern, it’s true that we’re
changing. More than we know, until some-

thing like this happens! But I can see them.
I can see through the side of the mountain.”
Again she turned to stare with her fathom-
less gaze into distances no human eye ever
pierced before, unaided.

“They’re coming,” she said. “Through the
mists, the way we came.”

Swiftly Kern told Elje what she had said.
Elje leaned forward abruptly.

“Through the labyrinth?” she cried. “But
they can’t! No one can come that way with-
out a guide. They won’t get far before they’re
overcome by the gasses.”

“They have a guide,” Kua said in a
strangely gentle voice, turning her gaze upon
Elje. “Your friend. Gerd.”

CHAPTER VI
Betrayal

H ORRIFIED silence filled the cave for
a moment when Kern ceased his trans-
lation. Then bedlam broke out. The en-
circling men who had listened so far in si-
lence burst into violent speech, some deriding
Kua’s claim, some cursing Gerd. Elje si-
lenced them with a sharp command.

“I don’t believe you,” she said flatly. “Gerd
wouldn’t betray us.”

Kua shrugged. “You’d better prepare to
meet them,” was all she said.

For a moment Elje’s composure broke.
“But I don’t — it can’t be Gerd! He wouldn’t!
Kern, how can we meet them? They’re a
hundred to our one! This was our last refuge.
If they’re coming here, all is lost!”

“They don’t know we’re expecting them,”
Kern said. “That’s our only advantage. Make
the most of it. Is there any room for am-
bushes along the way?”

Elje shook her head. “It’s almost a single-
file path everywhere. And Gerd knows it
better than even I do.” Her wings drooped.
Listlessly she stared into the fire. “This is the
end of all resistance to the Mountain,” she
said. “This is the day it wins the fight. None
of us can come out alive. Gerd! I can’t be-
lieve it!”

“The Mountain — you think?” Kern asked

her.

“It must be that. He passed all our tests —
and we have rigid ones — but somehow he
must have been able to bide the truth from
us. He’s one of the Mountain’s slaves and.

WAY OF THE GODS 33

when it commanded, he had to obey,”

“That proves it!” Kern said suddenly.
“Why should the Mountain move against you
today of all days, unless it has something to
fear? Gerd’s been with you a year, you say.
The Mountain could have struck any hour of
all that time. But it waited — for an emer-
gency. And this is the emergency. If it’s
afraid of us, then maybe we’re stronger than
we know. Maybe—”

From the mists outside the high, hollow
notes of a horn broke into his speech. Kern
spun around. Voices rose in angry babble
from the platform. There was a beating of
wings that made a noise almost deafening
under the dome of the cavern, and the fire
flared wildly, the red canvas of Elje’s tent
flapped in the blast as the outlaws rushed to
the defense of their last refuge. Elje, shout-
ing commands, rose with them.

Kua and Byrna turned white faces to Kern.
Sam Brewster, behind them, looked a ques-
tion. Rapidly Kern told them what had been
said.

“You’d better wait here,” he finished. “I
don’t know what’s coming, but you’ll be safer
inside.”

Sam smiled a grim and dreadful smile. “I
can help,” he reminded Kern. “I’ll come out-
side.”

Together they walked to the door of the
cave. There was tumult beyond, but an or-
derly tumult. Ranks of the winged outlaws
were hurrying aloft to hang overhead in wait.
Elje marshaled the rest with a hopeless sort
of efficiency into reserves. Before she had
finished, the horn sounded again, on a note of
triumph, and the first of the enemy burst
through the fog upon them.

“You see,” Elje said to Kern, the hopeless-
ness clear in her voice. “They wanted us out
in the open where they could finish us quick-
est. They even gave warning so we’d be wait-
ing for them. That’s how sure they are of us.”

From the front of the platform a wave of
the outlaw fighters, knives flashing in their
hands, rose to meet the newcomers. And from
above a second wave dived on half-closed
wings. For a few moments there was a
bloody melee at the mouth of the aerial entry
where the enemy poured through.

“We can hold them five minutes,” Elje
said. “After that, we’re through.”

Now for the first time Kern saw how the
winged men fought. The hawk-dive was the
thing he thought of as he watched the
fighters swoop on their prey, saw the flash of

knives held at an expert angle for the slash
that would cripple wing-muscles and send the
victim hurtling helplessly to the ground. One
sweeping cut across the chest-muscles was
enough to put a man out of the fight.

But if the intended prey saw his adversary
coming, then it was a matter of soaring and
swooping for position. And Kern saw many
times a winged man, outmaneuvered by his
enemy, rise on desperate wings and hurl him-
self headlong into a death-like embrace,
wings folded, so that the two fell like a
single plummet, each striving frantically as
they dropped twisting through the air for a
blow that would cripple his adversary and
break the wing-locked grip before the ground
came too near.

Now the gush of the enemy through the fog
had become too great to stem as they poured
by the score out of their narrow entry. The
fight which had for a few minutes hovered
at the mouth of the gap swept backward and
upward until the great tent of vapor over the
platform was filled with struggling men, and
the air was blackened with the shadows of
their wings.

“They aren’t using those light-cones,” Kern
said. “I’ve been waiting to dodge but none
have come through yet. Why?”

“I think because the Mountain sends out
the light-beam that focuses through the
wires,” Elje told him. “That’s the way their
weapons usually work. And the Mountain
can’t penetrate our mists and our rocks here.
They’ve got to fight hand-to hand — but they
can do it. There are too many of them. I —
Kern, look! Is that Gerd?”

A FLASH of red wings and red hair
showed through the melee as some-
one went by on whistling wings, too fast to
see clearly. Kern caught one glimpse of a
dark face and pale, fixed eyes — and thought
there was grief in the eyes and the dis-
torted face in that one glancing look he
caught of it.

Elje, beside him, shouted something across
the platform and from its lip another wave
of men rose in the hopeless defense of their
stronghold.

“We’ll go up with the last,” Elje said quiet-
ly, glancing over her shoulder at the men who
remained. “One more wave and then — the
last. This way we’ll kill the greatest number
before it’s over. Have you a knife, Kern?”
As she spoke a man with a dripping knife
soared past them over the edge of the plat-

34 THRILLING WONDER STORIES

form, blood falling from a dozen wounds, face
set -in blind, fanatic violence. Squarely be-
fore them they saw him falter in midair, his
gaze going past them to something in the
shadow of the cave. Abruptly then he stiff-
ened, his chin jerked up and his wings folded
back as if they had been suddenly broken.
He fell in a long slide, momentum-borne and
inert, and crashed at Elje’s very feet.

She had her knife at his throat in a swift,
lithe crouch before she saw that no knife was
necessary. Bewildered, she looked up at
Kern.

He stooped and took the wet blade from the
man’s hand, wiped it on his leather jerkin.

“Don’t look back, Elje,” he warned her
harshly. “Sam? Sam!”

“It’s all right, Kern.” Sam Brewster’s voice
had a dreadful sort of amusement in it. “I’m
not — looking.”

Elje stared, speechless, into Kern’s face as
the other mutant sauntered up to join them
in the shelter of a heap of rock at the edge of
the platform. Sam’s smile was thin and cold.
The secondary lids veiled his eyes, but a
gleam in their depths glittered even through
the film and Kern looked hastily away.

“What — what is it?” Elje faltered. “What
killed this man?”

“I did.” Sam was grinning without mirth.
“Like this.”

He turned away, face lifted, scanning the
turmoil overhead where men dived and
soared on blood-dappled wings, clasped one
another in deathly embraces and hurtled
earthward with knives flashing between them.
At the edge of the platform, only a dozen
feet overhead, such a pair writhed in gasping,
murderous combat. As they watched, one
man freed his knife-hand and in the same
motion drove the blade hilt-deep into the
other’s chest!

The killer’s wings spread and stiffened in
anticipation of what was to come, as his victim
clutched convulsively at his shoulders in a
last effort to save himself. For an instant one
man’s wings supported them both. Then the
dying man’s body went limp. Wings flaccid,
he fell away from the blade and went hurtling
downward through the mists, twisting and
turning over while blood pumped from his
chest.

The killer paused for a moment in midair,
breathing in deep gasps and looking for an-
other adversary. His glancing eyes crossed
Sam Brewster’s. For an instant he hung

there, panting for breath, gaze locked with
Sam’s.

The knife dropped from his loosened fin-
gers. Eyes still wide, he heeled over in the
air stiffly. His wings broke backward and he
fell after the man he had just killed. They
vanished almost together into the fog below.

Sam laughed grimly. When he turned the
secondary lids were closed again over his
eyes.

“I can kill anyone who catches my eyes,
when they’re open,” he said.

Elje did not understand the words, but his
gesture was enough. She caught her breath
softly and looked away in sheer instinctive
revulsion from that deathly gaze.

“Elje, we’ve got to do something,” Kern
said. “Now, while we can. We’ve got Sam.
Kua and Byrna have their own powers, too.
There’s no use waiting here to be killed. If
only we could get away.”

“Where?” Elje asked somberly. “The
Mountain could find us wherever we went.”

“We could go to the Mountain.” Kern’s
voice was more confident than he felt. “If
it’s so anxious to see us dead, then it must be
afraid of us. Anyhow, that’s our only hope.
Is there any way out except the way we came
here?”

Elje gestured aloft. “Only up. And you can
see how thick the vapors are.”

Kern glanced around the platform. There
were perhaps fifty men remaining on their
feet, waiting to be thrown into the last wave
of the defense. He looked toward the cave-
mouth and beckoned. Kua and Byrna hurried
across the platform toward him, their faces
pale and anxious.

“Kua,” he said. “A little while ago you
found you could look through walls. Look
up. Do you think you could tell which of
those vapors up there are poisonous and
which aren’t?”

Kua’s face lifted: her single eye narrowed.
For a long moment no one spoke.

“No, I’m not sure,” she said. “I can see a
long way. through to the clear air. I can see
that some of the fog flows in definite patterns,
much thicker than the rest. But what’s poi-
son and what isn’t — no one could tell that by
looking, Kern.”

“Is there a path through the places where
the fog’s thin?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll have to take a chance on it, then.
Maybe if it’s thin enough to breathe, we can
get through.”

WAY OF THE GODS

R APIDLY he told Elje what he hoped.

“There are men enough left here to
give us a chance if we fight our way. Sam
and Kua are worth enough to be carried.
I’ve never fought in the air and I wouldn’t
be much help, so I’ll carry Byrna. It’s worth
trying. Elje. Better than waiting here to be
killed.”

“Yes.” Elje’s voice was hopeless. “Better
to die that way than this. All right, Kern,
we’ll go.”

She turned and shouted commands to the
last men around her. A few minutes later the
remnant of the rebel band went soaring into
the air.

The platform fell away below. It was like
plunging into a maelstrom of shouts and cries,
groans, gasps for breath, the deafening beat
of many wings. Blood rained about them,
knives flashed and fell, bodies hurtled past
toward the ground. With Byrna’s light weight
in his arms, Kern beat heavily upward. Con-
fidence had suddenly begun to glow in him,
against all reason. They would make it. He
was irrationally sure of that.

And they did. But not all of them.

Sam Brewster was the one who fell. Almost
at the last, when their depleted band had
reached nearly the dome of the vaporous tent,
a flung knife transfixed one of Sam’s bearers
between the wings. He screamed, arched
backward, and fell. Someone beside him
dived too late for the reeling basket- seat in
which Sam rode. The mutant pitched forward
into space and dropped without a cry.

It would have been suicide to dive back
into that maelstrom of death in an effort to
catch him. Sick at heart, Kern saw him fall
twisting toward the ground. He saw, too, how
man after man of the swarm around him
stiffened and dropped after Sam on limp
wings as the mutant’s lethal gaze took his own
escort of dead men around him to his death.

Then they plunged into the choking mists
overhead, and no one had time to think of
anything but his own breathing, his own
urgent need to follow exactly in the wing-
path of Kua’s bearers as she guided them
through the fog.

* * * * *

Like a gigantic thunderhead the Mountain
lifted its clear, pale bulk into the zenith. The
mind quailed from the very thought of such
height; it seemed to lean forward over the
fliers and hover for a monumental collapses

that would crush the world.

When they drew' close, Byrna shuddered in
Kern’s arms and turned like a child to clasp
his neck and hide her face on his shoulder.

“I can feel it,” she said in a muffled voice.
“It’s watching. It’s trying to — to get into my
mind. Don’t think, Kern. Don’t let it reach
you!”

Kern was briefly aware of a hot, coiling
ribbon of hatred that moved through his brain
and was gone as his mind slammed its gates
of thought against the intruder. It was not
easy to force his wings to carry them onward
when his whole mind rebelled against draw-
ing any nearer to the Mountain. He saw re-
vulsion on the faces around him too, and
caught uneasy glances cast sideward at his
face. Their pace had perceptibly slowed.

“I don’t like it either, Elje,” he said to the
winged girl across the sw'imming void that
flowed past far below. “But we’ve got to do
it. What choice have we, except to be killed?
They may be following us from the cave al-
ready. Our only hope’s to reach the Moun-
tain where we viay do a little damage be-
fore — ” He did not finish. There was no need
to finish.

Now' they were so near the wall of opal-
escence rising like the end of the world before
them that Kern could see their own reflec-
tions floating distorted high up on the face
of the cliff.

“Is it glass?” he asked.

“No one knows.” Elje controlled a shiver.
“No one who came close enough to find out
ever returned. It may be just a — a solid mass.
I don’t — ” She had glanced across her shoul-
der to answer him. Now her gaze went fur-
ther.

“They’re following,” she said in a dull voice.
“If it is solid, we’re trapped.”

Kern looked back. In a dark mass like a
low, level cloud on the horizon, the winged
ranks of the enemy moved in their wake.

Kua suddenly pointed.

“Look ahead,” she said. “Up there on the
cliff, to the left — is it a cave? I — why, it’s
opening wider!”

Everyone looked eagerly. There was a mo-
ment’s silence. The Mountain too seemed to
wait and listen. But Kern saw no change in
the face of the cliff. Unbroken, unshadowed,
opalescent, it lifted before them.

Wind sighed past them toward the cliff,
ruffling their wings. The sigh grew stronger
— was a rising sough of sound— a sough that
soared to an ear-stunning, shriek Headlong

36 THRILLING WONDER STORIES

they whirled toward the Mountain, helpless,
drawn upon that sudden irresistible wind.
Kern clutched Byma tighter and fought his
wrenched wings as the cliff rose up in his
face, like a solid cloud.

Dimly he could make out the shape of the
opening at the same moment it engulfed him.
Stunned with surprise, he went tumbling into
the cliffside on that sucking wind, half -blind-
ed by the opalescent mist which filled the
tunnel. It was like spinning through a solid,
for the impalpable stuff they flew through
was indistinguishable to the eye from the stuff
of the Mountain itself.

Light dimmed behind them as they were
drawn helpless in tumbling flight deeper and
deeper into the heart of the cloud — the Moun-
tain — there was no term for what it was they
sped through.

The wind that bore them along slowed.
The deafening noise of it fell and was a sigh,
a whisper — silence. For an instant they hung
in opalescent nothingness, gasping for breath.
Then Kua’s voice sounded sweetly in the
hush.

“Look back — look back! I can see the way
we came. I can see it closing. Like water
flowing together. No, like running sand.”

Kern ceased to hear her. For suddenly he
was aware of an almost imperceptible thick-
ening in the mist around him. Something not
seen, but felt A closing and a supporting, so
that the weight of his body and Byrna’s no
longer hung wholly upon his wings. A solidi-
fying in the very air.

He could not move.

CHAPTER VII
Combat

ELENTLESSLY the Mountain which
had opened to receive them had closed
again, gently and solidly. The little group
of captives hung frozen in the very postures
of flight spread-winged, hair still blowing in
a wind which no longer moved past them.
They were frozen as if in a moment of eternal
Now, as if time had ceased to move and their
own motions had ceased with it.

And then before them in the opalescent
cloud of the Mountain a thin coil of light be-
gan to glow.

Swiftly it grew clearer. And Kern looked
with the eyes of the body upon that which he

had seen before with the eyes of the mhal
He felt the malevolence beat out at them be-
fore the fire itself came wholly into focus,
strong hatred, curiously impersonal. It was
the hatred of a Mountain, a cloud, not a
human hatred.

The lazy, coiling ribbon moved through the
solid fog, the foggy solid glass, somewhere
ahead of the captives. It was impossible to
gauge distances here, but the thing was close
enough to see in every detail. Its slowly
writhing coil that drew in and out of its own
folds with a leisurely, never-ending motion.
Its burning color that was hot to the eye and
hot to the perceptive mind with the heat of its
consuming hatred.

Something lay within the coils. It was draw-
ing its ribbon -folds caressingly about that
something. They could not yet see what

For an instant or two the great, slow, burn-
ing thing moved in its long folds before them,
blind and impersonal and hating. But then
came a new change. Then it looked at them.

Spots of luminous darkness began to swim
slowly through the coils. They came and
went Whenever a coil moved itself to face
the captives in the solid glass, eye-spots
swam upon that coil, flickering out again as
the fiery curve moved on.

It watched. It waited and hated and was
silent

That which lay within it, bathed in the
caressing coils, began to move. The coils al-
tered their pattern to leave what they sup-
ported visible. And Kern felt a shock of
emptiness within him that made the vision
blur for a moment. When he looked again it
was unmistakable and clear before him.

Bruce Hallam, lying quietly on the sup-
porting coils, his eyes open and regarding
them as impersonally as the eyes that came
and went upon the ribbons of fire.

“This — ” Bruce Hallam said clearly “ — is
my world.”

The words came to them as if through emp-
ty air, with a cold clarity that allowed of no
mistake. For it was not wholly Bruce Hallam
who spoke. It was a voice of fire too. Hatred
and blinding light coiled through the words
as it coiled through the fog before their eyes.
Two beings spoke with the single voice, but
two beings who were now one.

Sudden memory flashed through Kern’s
mind. He saw the long-ago, far-away room
again, where the little group of mutants had
stepped from one universe to another. He
saw Bruce opening his steel door upon a

WAY OF THE GODS 37

waiting world, searching it with his eyes,
closing the door again. He understood now.
Bruce had known. Somehow, he had known
in the single glance which world held kinship
for him and which did not.

Bruce, with his mutant’s uncanny skill at
creating out of any means at hand the more-
than-machinery which would do his bidding,
had recognized this world. Kern remembered
with shock his own blindness when Elje had
described to him what the Mountain’s slaves,
under its guidance, could do with any materi-
al at hand — how, when they still suspected
Kern of complicity with the enemy, they had
cleared his room of any matter out of which
he might build a weapon to destroy them.

Yes, this world was Bruce Hallam’s — not
Kern’s after all. A -winged -world, yes, but a
world under dominance. And Bruce’s was
the dominant realm.

All this flashed through his mind with the
swiftness of a single thought, -while Bruce’s
coldly burning words still sounded in their
ears. He was remembering how impersonal
Bruce had always been, how remote from
human feeling, when he heard the cold voice
again.

“There is no place in my world for you,”
Bruc told them calmly. “There is room only
for the winged people — and Me. You come
from malleable flesh, a malleable heritage. I
can not trust you here. My coming into the
•world made a cyclone here in the Mountain,
drawing out forces better left untouched. I
was helpless then. I could not save — myself
- — until I was out of your reach. The time has
come to destroy the last remnants of those
who defy me. And you mutants whose flesh I
can not control must go with the rest.”

He did not stir, but the coiling flame moved
with sudden quickened speed, flowing toward
them through the imprisoning glass which
held the humans so inflexibly. Bruce, then,
was only the voice of this dreadful duo. The
ribbon of flame was the body.

A long loop of it moved lazily forward,
falling gently like a silk ribbon through air.
After it the fiery length followed gracefully,
weaving in and out of its own folds, and with-
in the folds, always caressed by them stream-
ing over and around his body, Bruce Hallam
moved too, rigidly, supported on the coiling
loops, not a muscle of his own limbs stirring.

K ERN watched them come. He had no
idea what would happen when the
burning coils touched the first human, but he

could feel the white heat of its malevolence
flow before it. Helpless, voiceless in the grip
of the unyielding glass, he strained fiercely
for — for — he did not know what. Only to be
free to fight even uselessly against the on-
coming enemy.

Sharply the thought in his mind broke in
two. He had known this cleavage before, but
the utter strangeness of it stunned him for a
moment so that his thoughts went blank while
something, something stirred incredibly
through his body.

The old feeling of change, of unutterable
newness, of an unguessed sense opening with-
in him like nothing man ever knew before.

Three times he had known this feeling since
he stepped into the winged world. Three times
he had crushed it down, fearing and hating it
for its threat of making him alien again, alien
to the winged people he had hoped would be
his own. But this time he did not fight. This
time, in the violent, straining effort to break
free, he broke instead some barrier which had
until now held back the new thing, the some-
thing which had burgeoned relentlessly with-
in him ever since he came within the Moun-
tain’s realm.

The glass walls that held him like a pris-
oner in ice grew dim and vanished. His com-
panions pilloried in glass beside him wavered
into darkness. He no longer felt the warmth
of Byrna frozen in glass in his arms. Every-
thing was dark — even the slow — coiling rib-
bons that looped leisurely toward him through
solid substance.

And then out of that darkness came light.
All about him came light. And it took a long
moment for him to discover he was not seeing
that light with eyes. He was seeing it — in-
credibly, impossibly — with his whole body.
He saw everything around him in one all-
encompassing range.

“This is the way the Mountain sees,” he
knew with sudden certainty. How he knew
it was not clear; it was a knowledge that came
with the new vision. He and the Mountain,
they shared a common faculty.

Motion far away caught his fathomless at-
tention and he was looking out through the
clouded side of the Mountain and seeing, as if
he stood before them, the flight of the on-
coming winged men who had followed the
fugitives from the eyrie. They were nearly
here now, approaching the monstrous cliff as
blindly as if they meant to dash themselves
to death against it.

With the same all-embracing sight, Kern

38 THRILLING WONDER STORIES

was aware of the people frozen around him
into the glass, and of the looping coils that
flowed toward them, and of Bruce Hallam,
rigid as an image of stone, moving with the
moving ribbons.

But they looked very different now. The
people.

He knew their faces, the familiar outlines
of their bodies, but he could see through the
bodies with his new vision. And the appalling
thing he saw was not the structure of bone
and muscle and nerve which a part of his
mind expected there. These things were only
pale shadows upon the — the other.

The people were rings of flat, luminous
color, disc upon disc of it, superimposed,
overlapping, no two people with the same
patterns or the same colors. And he knew
that the muscular structure humans are aware
of, the skeleton, the nerves, are only a part of
what comprises them. Only a part — and not
the part important to the Mountain. The
Mountain ruled by other means.

Every flying man approaching outside the
cliff had one thing in common with his fel-
lows. Each was made up of ring after ring of
colors, brilliant arcs and half-moons lying
one upon another and in continual delicate
shifting motion. But in each, and moving
slowly over the rings, a circle of luminous
darkness swung. Darkness like the eyes
which swam up to the surface of the coiling
ribbons that embraced Bruce Hallam. An
eye— the eye of the Mountain.

That was the thing the Mountain used in
them to transmit its commands, then. The
point of contact in each man that made him
a slave when the orders came.

There was no such eye in any of the people
imprisoned around Kern. He saw his own
body with this new vision, rings and discs of
color like the rest, and with no dark, circling
spot that meant the Mountain owned him.

The Mountan is a creature of glass, he told
himself clearly. Its body is this opalescent
stuff which is solid or gas as the Mountain
wills. It can make tunnels and caverns like
open mouths through it and close them again.
And its brain, its motivating force, is the rib-
bon of fire, endless, revolving upon itself in
the center. It has many strange senses. One
of them I share now.

He thought: When we came here, we some-
how brought on a cyclone of violent forces
drawn from the Mountain itself. Because
Bruce Hallam had an inhuman kinship with
the entity which dwells here. But it was an

entity so strong, so accustomed to mold the
minds of its victims and use them like tools
to create other tools, that we ourselves were
reshaped without knowing it.

This strange new sense began very early to
take shape in me. Kua reacted too, and Byr-
na. Sam? I don’t know. He’s gone. But as
for me, I have changed.

Something stirred mysteriously through his
flesh, and without the need to look down,
Kern’s horizon-circling vision told him that
light had begun to glow in him — fire — long,
rolling loops of fire that stretched with in-
credible flexibility through the solid glass
imprisoning him.

T HE ribbon of fire upon which Bruce’s
body rode paused in its motion, hesitated,
almost drew back. Kern felt dimly its sur-
prise and its strange, inhuman hatred. But
only dimly, for his own mind was too stunned
with this final revelation to let any other
feeling through.

Too malleable, he thought despairingly —
flesh too malleable to hold its own form under
the irresistible altering pull that was the
Mountain. And now through the icy glass
which held the humans rigid, two shapes of
coiling flame turned lazily over and over —
one shape supporting a human body and
glowing incandescent with malevolence, the
other still too amazed for emotion, but
stretching its new limbs of fire with a sort of
reluctant, voluptuous luxury as the endless
ribbon rolled in convolutions of flame in and
out of its own length. A strange, inhuman
luxury, this, to stretch upon the firm, perme-
able glass, moving through it as light might
move, in a dimension of its own.

Hatred like a blast of furnace-heat struck
upon Kern’s new awareness with an impact
that jolted him out of this bewildering mental
fog. Hate and fear. He had felt that blast
before, invisibly in the voids of thought, and
terror had come with it so that he fled blindly
to escape. But this time fear did not follow
after the hate. This time he welcomed con-
flict.

“Now we’re equals — matched equals,” he
told himself, and felt even in this moment of
danger and surprise the utter difference of his
own mind through which thoughts moved
slowly and clearly, like his new limbs through
the solidity of the glass. If he had ever owned
a body of flesh and blood, it was his no longer.
If his mind had ever dwelt there and shaped
its thoughts to the contours of brain and skull,

WAY OF THE GODS 39

they were shaped no longer. This was new,
new, terrible and wonderful beyond human
understanding.

Slow exultation began to burn in him as he
rolled the great coils of fire which were his
body toward that which until now had dwelt
here alone. Now the Mountain had a double
mind — if the fiery ribbon was indeed the mind
of the thing — but moving still through a sin-
gle gigantic body of opalescent glass. And
within that vast body, the doubled mind
moved upon itself in suicidal combat.

Hatred was a bath of flame that engulfed
him as their farthest coiling loops touched —
touched and engaged with sudden violence.
But Kern was not afraid now, not repelled.
With a surging lunge he tested the strength
in that shape which was the twin of his own.
The ribbons writhed and strained. Then they
paused for a moment and drew back in mu-
tual consent. And simultaneously, as if hurled
by a single mind, lunged forward again.

This time the fiery limbs entangled until
their full endlessly revolving lengths were
wholly engaged with one another and the two
identical shapes of rolling fire strove furiously
together in a single knot that boiled with
ceaseless motion.

Hatred burned and bubbled all around
Kern’s awareness as he strove coil against
coil with the enemy. But it did not touch him
any more. He felt no fear. And when he be-
gan to realize that he could not vanquish this
being by strength alone, not even then did
he feel fear. Emotion was gone from him.
Coil by coil he tested the thing he strove with,
and coil by coil he found it braced irresistibly
against his greatest strength. He could not
swerve it by a single loop.

But it could not swerve him. Matched in
strength as they were in shape, the two crea-
tures of flame lay for a moment upon the
clouded ice, limb straining against limb in a
perilous balance that permitted of no motion.

Then, very delicately, the awareness that
had been Kern reached out with a sense he
had not until this moment known he pos-
sessed, and touched the frozen body of Bruce
Hallam. For he knew now that he and this
enemy were too perfectly matched for either
to prevail, unless one or the other found a
lever by which his adversary could be over-
thrown.

Was it Bruce? Gently, and then with in-
creasing pressure, he tried that rigid, un-
yielding body which had once been human.
There was nothing — nothing. Not even the

discs of overlapping color which the still-
human exhibited to his new sight moved
through Bruce’s limbs. He was solid, unmov-
ing, a shape of nothingness, and no sense
could touch him. No, Bruce was not the
source through which strength might be
drained from the enemy.

What, then? Kern asked himself with pas-
sionless consideration. And the answer came
clearly and unhurried, as if it had waited only
this query to reply.

The winged men waiting outside the moun-
tain — that was the answer.

Almost outstripping the thought, his sight
and his strange new senses leaped to the sur-
face of the Mountain. There the slaves hung
on stretched wings, tilting to the updrafts
from below, circling and soaring and waiting
in mindless obedience for the command that
would release them from their mental thrall.

Once he had seen them as winged humans
fighting with fanatic violence. Now they were
only shapes of overlapping discs, full of
slowly turning motion, and in each the Eye of
the Mountain swimming leisurely over the
surface of the colors.

The Eye, he thought. The Eye!

IKE a new, unguessed arm his awareness
shot out and plunged into the nearest
spot of darkness which swam over the colored
discs. Plunged in— groped for contact — and
tapped a source of flame. Up through the arm
the flame leaped, and into Kern’s body of
matching flame. Almost imperceptibly he felt
the straining coils of the enemy give beneath
the pressure of his own.

Another, and another and another of the
flying shapes gave up its tiny source of fire,
and Kern’s strength grew with each. The
combat which had hung motionless in mutual
violence now writhed suddenly into action
again as the balance was destroyed. But the
fury of the enemy seemed to double too as
it felt itself bent backward upon its own fiery
coils.

What had been combat before the stasis
turned into abrupt turmoil now. The two rib-
bons of flame convulsed together, lashing and
whipping into an incandescent fury of strug-
gle. And Kern knew in a timeless moment or
two that even this was not enough. He must
find some last source of power to give him
the victory.

The arm with which he had robbed the fly-
ing men of their Eyes groped, plunged deep-

er, seeking more power within them,
amazingly, found it.

For an instant Kern could not understand
why strength in a full, deep tide flowed into
him as the light began to fail in his enemy.
And then he understood, and a surge of tri-
umph for the first time glowed through his
whole being.

For in giving its strength to its slaves, that
it might command them, the Enemy had
opened a channel which ran both ways. And
in draining the slaves, Kern found himself
draining the Enemy itself — reaching back and
back through each slave into the source from
which that strength came.

From a score, a hundred channels, the
Mountain must have felt its own power drain
away. Its power, but not its hate. Kern could
feel the sheer, inhuman malevolence burning
about him in great washes of flame as the
strength of the coils against his grew steadily
weaker. The fire sank down within it, dim-
ming and fading as the creature bled its own
power away — bled flame, and slowly, slowly
died!

The turning ribbons of fight no longer
moved against Kern’s awareness. His limbs
engulfed not a luminous involuted band, but
a thin, pale hatred which fell apart as he drew
his own body back. It fell apart into a tiny
rain of droplets, each of them dancing with its
own seed of hate. Twinkling, fading, and the
hatred fading with them, until they were
gone.

Kern felt change all about him, in the sub-
stance of the Mountain itself. A vast, im-
ponderable shifting of the clouded glass, a
falling apart of the atoms which composed it,
as its soul of fire had fallen. The opalescent
stuff was a fog — a mist — a thin, dissipating
gas which no longer supported him. The cold
of clear air struck terribly upon his fiery
limbs as the Mountain dissolved from about
him. He convulsed upon himself in a knot of
flame that seemed to consume itself and to
cease — to cease —

*****

Everything was blank around him. Neither
dark nor light, but void. He hung motionless
upon nothing. He was no longer a shape of

flame. He was no longer a shape of flesh. He
was nothing, nowhere.

This was infinity, where time was not. For
milleniums, he thought, he drifted there upon
oblivion. Milleniums, or moments!

From far away a something began to be.
He did not recognize it — he knew only that
where nothingness had been, now there was
a something. He heard a call. That was it, a
call, a sound of incredible sweetness.

A voice? Yes, it was a voice of sheer mel-
ody, saying a name. He did not know the
name.

“Kern — Kern,” it cried. The syllable had
no meaning to him, but the sweetness of the
voice that shaped it gradually began to rouse
him from his stupor. Over and over the syl-
lable sounded, and then with a sudden blaze
of awareness he knew it for what it was.

“My name!” he thought with amazement.
“My own name!”

The mind came back into him, and he knew.
Like Bruce Hallam, he had hung frozen and
empty from the touch of the all-consuming
fire which had been himself. Like Bruce, he
had been emptier than death.

“Kern, Kern, come back,” wailed the voice
of impossible sweetness. He knew it now.
Byrna’s voice, lovely as a siren’s magical
song, summoning him back to the living.

Slowly, slowly, he felt warmth return to
him. Slowly he drew his mind together again,
and then his body came back around him, and
with infinite effort he lifted the eyelids that
shut out the world.

He lay on a hillside in the full warm tide
of the sunlight which poured down from an
empty sky. There was no Mountain any more.
No vertiginous thunderhead of glass tower-
ing up the zenith, casting its pale shadow
across the world. Someone bent over him,
holding her wings to shut the sun’s glare from
his eyes. Her wings glistened.

Tentatively he flexed his own. And then
strength came back with a magical rush to
him, and he sat up with a strong beat of his
pinions that almost lifted him from the
ground. All around him smiling faces watched
in the shadow of their wings.

And he knew that he was free at last, and
the winged world was free. And he was no
longer alien.

THRILLING WONDER STORIES
And

Next Issue’s Headliners: THE BOOMERANG CIRCUIT, a Kim Rendell Novel by Murray
Leinster — THE BIG NIGHT, an Interplanetary Novelet by Hudson Hastings,
and THE NAMELESS SOMETHING, a Bud Gregory
Novelet bv William Fitzgerald

SKIT-TREE PLANET

By MURRAY LEBNSTER

Against an intangible distant enemy, Wentworth and Haynes
battle to save their spaceship — when defeat means exile!

Wentworth sent the scout flier zooming in the direction of the mysterious city

T HE COMMUNICATOR-phone set up
a clamor when the sky was just begin-
ning to gray in what, on this as yet
unnamed planet, they called the east because
the local sun rose there. The call-wave had
turned on the set. Bob Wentworth kicked
off his blankets and stumbled from his bunk
in the atmosphere-flier, and went sleepily
forward to answer. He pushed the answer-
stud.

“Hello, what’s the trouble?” he said weari-
ly. “Talk louder, there’s some static. Oh —
No, there’s no trouble. Why should there be?
The devil I’m late reporting! Haynes and I
obeyed orders and tried to find the end of a
confounded skit-tree plantation. We chased
our tails all day long, but we made so much
westing that we gained a couple of hours
light. So it isn’t sunrise yet, where we are.”
Wentworth yawned as he listened.

42 THRILLING WONDER STORIES

“Oh, we set down the flier on a sort of dam
and went to sleep,” he answered. “No, noth-
ing happened. We’re used to feeling creepy.
We thrive on it. Haynes says he’s going to
do a sculpture group of a skit-tree planter
which will be just an eye peeking around a
tree-trunk. No! Hang it, no!

“We photographed a couple of hundred
thousand square miles of skit-trees growing
in neat rows, and we photographed dams, and
canals, and a whole irrigation system, but
not a sign of a living creature. No cities, no
houses, no ruins, no nothing. I’ve got a
theory, McRae, about what happened to the
skit-tree planters.”

He yawned again.

“Yeah. I think they built up a magnificent
civilization and then found a snark. Snark!
Snark. Yes. And the snark was a boojum.”
He paused. “So they silently faded away.”

He grinned at the profanity that came out
of the communicator-speaker. Then — back
at the irreverently nicknamed Galloping Cow
which was the base ship of the Extra-Solar -
ian Research Institute expedition to this star-
cluster— McRae cut off.

Wentworth stretched, and looked out of
the atmosphere -flier’s windows. He absently
noticed that the static on the communication -
set kept up, which was rather odd on a FM
receiver. But before the fact could have any
meaning, he saw something in motion in the
pale gray light of dawn. He squinted. Then
he caught his breath.

He stood frozen until the moving object
vanished. It moved, somehow, as if it carried
something. But it was bigger than the Gal-
loping Cow! Only after it vanished did he
breathe again, and then he licked his lips and
blinked.

Haynes’ voice came sleepily from the
bunk-space of the flier.

“What’s from the Galloping Cow? Plan-
ning to push off for Earth?”

Wentworth took a deep breath and stared
where the moving thing had gone out of
sight.

“No,” he said then, very quietly. “McRae
was worred because we hadn’t reported.
It’s two hours after sunrise back where the
ship is.” He swallowed. “Want to get up
now?”

“I could do with coffee,” said Haynes,
“pending a start for home.”

W ENTWORTH heard him drop his feet
to the floor. Bob Wentworth pinched

himself and winced, and swallowed again,
and then twisted the opener of a beverage
can labeled Coffee, and it began to make
bubbling noises. He put it aside to heat and
brew itself, and pulled out two breakfast-
rations. He put them in the readier. Finally
he stared again out the flier’s window.

The light outside grew stronger. To the
north— if where the sun rose was east — a
low but steep range of mountains began just
beyond the spot where the flier had landed
for the night. It had settled down on a
patently artificial embankment of earth, some
fifty feet high, that ran out toward the skit-
tree sea from one of the lower mountain
spurs. The moving thing had gone into those
mountains, as if it carried something'. But it
was bigger.

Haynes came forward, yawning.

“I feel as if this were going to be a good
day,” he said, and yawned again. “I wish I
had some clay to mess with. I might even do
a portrait bust of you, Wentworth, lacking a
prettier model.”

“Keep an eye out the window,” said Went-
worth. Meanwhile you might set the table.”

He went back to his bunk and dressed
quickly. His expression was blank and in-
credulous. Once more he pinched himself.
Yes, he was awake. He went back to where
steaming coffee and the breakfast-platters
waited on the board normally used for navi-
gation.

The communication-set still emitted static,
cui’iously steady, scratchy noise that should
not have come in on a frequency-modula-
tion set at all. It should not have come in
especially on a planet which had plainly once
been inhabited, but whose every inhabitant
and every artifact had vanished utterly.

Habitation was so evident, and seemed to
have been so recent, that most of the mem-
bers of the expedition felt a creepy sensation
as if eyes were watching them all the time.
But that was absurd, of course.

Haynes ate his chilled fruit. The readier
had thawed the frozen fruit, and not only
thawed but cooked the rest of breakfast.
Wentworth drank a preliminary cup of
coffee.

“I’ve just had an unsettling experience,
Haynes,” he said carefully. “Do I look un-
usually cracked, to you?”

“Not for you,” said Haynes. “Not even for
any man who not only isn’t married but isn’t
even engaged. I attribute my splendid men-
tal health to the fact that I’m going to get

SKIT-TREE PLANET

married as soon as we get back to Earth.
Have I mentioned it before?”

Wentworth ignored the question.
“Something’s turned up — with a reason
back of it.” he said in a queer tone. “Check
me on this. We found the first skit-trees on
Cetis Alpha Three. They grew in neat rows
that stretched out for miles and miles. They
had patently been planted by somebody who
knew what he was doing, and why.

“We also found dams, and canals, and a
complete irrigation system. We found places
where ground had been terraced and graded,
and where various trees and plants grew in
what looked like a cockeyed form of decora-
tive planting.

“Those clearings could have been sites for
cities, only there were no houses or ruins,
or any sign that anything had ever been built
there. We hunted that planet with a fine-
toothed comb, and we’d every reason to
believe it had recently been inhabited by
a highly civilized race. But we never found
so much as a chipped rock or a brick or any
shaped piece of metal or stone to prove it.

“We found out a civilization had existed,
and it had vanished, and when it vanished it
took away everything it had worked with,
except that it didn’t tear up its plantings or'
put back the dirt it had moved. Right?”

“Put dispassionately, you sound like you’re
crazy,” said Haynes cheerfully. “But you’re
recounting facts. Okay so far.’’

“McRae tore his hair because he couldn’t
take back anything but photographs,” Went-
worth went on. “Oh, you did a very fine
sculpture of a skit-tree fruit, but we froze
some real ones for samples, anyhow. We
went on to another solar system. And on a
planet there, we found skit-trees planted in
neat rows reaching for miles and miles, and
dams, and canals, and cleared places — and
nothing else. McRae frothed at the mouth
with frustration. Some non-human race had
space-travel. Eh?”

Haynes took a cup of coffee.

“The inference,” he agreed, “was made
unanimously by all the personnel of the
Galloping Cow.”

ERVOUSLY Wentworth glanced out
the flier window.

“We kept on going. On nine planets in
seven solar systems, we found skit-tree
plantations with rows up to six and seven
hundred miles long. — following great-circle
courses, by the way — and dams and irrigation

systems. Whoever planted those skit-trees
had space-travel on an interstellar scale, be-
cause the two farthest of the planets were two
hundred light-years apart. But we’ve never
found a single artifact of the race that planted
the skit-trees.”

“True,” said Haynes. “Too true! If we’d
loaded up the ship with souvenirs of the first
non-human civilized race ever to be discov-
ered, we’d have headed for home and I’d be a
married man now.”

“Listen!” Wentworth said painfully, “Could
it be that we never found any artifacts be-
cause there weren’t any? Could it be that a
creature — a monstrous creature — could have
developed instincts that led it to make dams
and canals like beavers do, and plantings like
some kind of ants do, only with the sort of
geometric precision that is characteristic of a
spider’s web? Could we have misread mere
specialized instinct as intelligence?”

Haynes blinked.

“No,” he said. “There’s seven solar sys-
tems, two hundred light-years apart, and a
specific species, obviously originating on
only one planet, spread out over two hundred
light-years. Not unless your animal could do
space-travel and carry skit-tree seeds with
him. What gave you that idea?”

“I saw something,” said Wentworth. He
took another deep breath. “I’m not going to
tell you what it was like, I don’t really be-
lieve it myself. And I am scared green! But
I wanted to clear that away before I men-
tioned— this. Listen!”

He waved his hand at the communicator-
set. Static came out of its speaker in a clack-
ing, monotonous, but continuous turned-
down din.

Haynes listened.

“What the devil? We shouldn’t get that
kind of stuff on a frequency-modulation
set!”

“We shouldn’t. Something’s making it.
Maybe what I saw was — domesticated.
In any case I’m going to go out and look for
tracks at the place where I saw it moving.”

“You? Not me? What’s the matter with
both of us?”

Wentworth shook his head.

“I’ll take a flame-pistol, though running-
shoes would be more appropriate. You can
hover overhead, if you like. But don’t try
to be heroic, Haynes.”

Haynes whistled.

“How about air reconnaisance first?” he
demanded. “We can look for tracks with a

44 THRILLING WONDER STORIES

telescope. If we see a jabberwock or some-
thing on that order, we can skip for the blue.
If we don’t find anything from the air, all
right. But a preliminary scout from aloft
would be wiser.”

“That might be sensible,” Wentworth ad-
mitted. “But the cussed thing scared me so
that I’ve got to face it sooner or later. All
right. Clear away this stuff and I’ll take the
ship up.”

While Haynes slid the cups and platters
into the refuse-disposal unit, he seated him-
self in the pilot’s seat, turned off the watch-
dog circuit that would have waked them if
anything living had come within a hundred
yards of the flier during the nighttime. Then
he gave the jets a warming-up flow of fuel.
Thirty seconds later, the flier lifted smoothly
and leveled off to hover at four hundred feet.
Wentworth took bearings on their landing-
place. There were no other landmarks that
would serve as guides, for keeping the flier
stationary.

The skit-trees began where the ground
grew fairly level, and they went on beyond
the horizon. They were clumps of thin and
brittle stalks which rose straight up for
eighty feet and then branched out and bore
copious quantities of a fruit for which no
human being oould imagine any possible use.

Each clump of trees was a geometrically
perfect circle sixty feet in diameter. There
were always just ninety-two feet between
clumps. They reached out in rows far beyond
the limit of vision. Only the day before, the
flier had covered fifteen hundred miles of
westing without coming to the end of this
particular planting.

W ITH THE flier hovering, Wentworth
used a high -power telescope to
search below. He hunted for long, long min-
utes, examining minutely every square foot
of half a dozen between-clump aisles with-
out result. There was no sign of the passage
of any creature, much less of the apparition
he would much rather not believe in.

“I think I’m going to have to go down and
hunt on foot,” he said reluctantly. “Maybe
there wasn’t anything. Maybe I’m crazy.”
Haynes spoke in mild tones.

“Speaking of craziness, is or isn’t that city
yonder a delusion?” he asked.

He pointed, and Wentworth jerked about.
Many, many miles away, something reared
upward beyond the horizon. It was indubit-
ablv a city, and they had searched nine

planets over without finding a single scrap
of chipped stone to prove the reality of the
skit-tree planters.

Wentworth could see separate pinnacles
and what looked like skyways connecting
them far above-ground. He snapped his cam-
era to his binoculars and focussed them, and
of course, the camera with them. He saw
architectural details of bewildering com-
plexity. He snapped the shutter of his
camera.

“That gets top priority,” said Wentworth.
“There’s no doubt about this!”

The thing he had seen before sunrise was
so completely incredible that it was easier to
question his vision than to believe in it. He
flung over the jet-controls so that the drive-
jets took the fuel from the supporting ones.
The flier went roaring toward the far-away
city.

“Take over,” he told Haynes. “I’m going
to call McRae back. He’ll break down and
cry with joy.”

He pushed the call-button. Seconds later a
voice came out of the communicator, muffled
and made indistinct by the roar of the jets.
Wentworth reported. He turned a tiny tele-
vision scanner on the huge, lacy construction
rising from a site still beyond the horizon.
McRae’s shout of satisfaction was louder
than the jets. He bellowed and cut off in-
stantly.

“The Galloping Cow is shoving off,” said
Wentworth. “McRae’s giving this position
and telling all mapping-parties to make for
it. And he’ll climb out of atmosphere to get
here fast. He wants to see that city.”

The flier wabbled, as Haynes’ hands on the
controls wabbled.

“What city?” he asked in an odd voice.

Wentworth stared unbelievingly. There
was nothing in sight but the lunatic rows of
skit-trees, stretching out with absolutely me-
chanical exactitude to the limit of vision on
the right, on the left, ahead, and behind to
the very base of the mountains. There simply
wasn’t any city. Wentworth gaped.

“Pull that film out of the camera. Take a
look at it. Were we seeing things?”

Haynes pulled out the already-developed
film. The city showed plainly. It had gone
on television to the Galloping Cow, too. It
had not been an illusion. Wentworth pushed
the call-button again as the flier went on to-
ward a vanished destination. After a mom-
ent he swore.

“McRae lost no time. He’s out of air al-

SKIT-TREE PLANET 45

ready, and our set won’t reach him. Where’d
that city go?”

He set the supersonic collision -alarm in
action. The radar. They revealed nothing.
The city no longer existed.

They searched incredulously for twenty
minutes, at four hundred miles an hour. The
radar picked up nothing. The collision-alarm
picked up no echoes.

“It was here!” growled Wentworth. “We’ll
go back and start over.”

He sent the flier hurtling back toward the
hills and the embankment where it had
rested during the night. The communicator
rasped a sudden furious burst of static.
Wentworth, for no reason whatever, jerked
his eyes behind. The city was there again.

Haynes photographed it feverishly as the
flier banked and whirled back toward it. For
a full minute it was in plain view, and the
static was loud. Then the static cut off.
Simultaneously, the city vanished once more.

GAIN a crazy circling. But the utterly
monotonous landscape 'below showed
no sign of a city-site, and it was impossible to
be sure that the flier actually quartered the
ground below, or whether it circled over the
same spot again and again, or what.

“If McRae turns up in the Galloping Cow,”
said Haynes, “and doesn’t find a blamed
thing, maybe he’ll think we've all gone crazy
and had better go home. And then — ”

“Then you’ll get married!” Wentworth
finished savagely. “Skip it! I’ve got an idea!
Back to the mountains once more.”

The flier whirled yet again and sped back
toward its night’s resting-place. Ten miles
from it, and five thousand feet up, the static
became still again.

Wentworth kicked a smoke-bomb release
and whirled the flier about so sharply that
his head snapped forward from the sudden
centrifugal force.

There was the city.

The flier roared straight for it. Static
rattled out of the communicator. One minute.
Two. He kicked the smoke-bomb release
again. Already the first bomb had hit ground
and made a second smoke-signal. Ten miles
on, he dropped a third.

The smoke-signals would burn for an hour,
and give him a perfect line on the vanishing
city. This time it did not vanish. It grew
larger and larger, and details appeared, and
more details.

It was a unit — a design of infinite complex-

ity, perfectly integrated. Story upon story,
with far-flung skyways connecting its turrets,
it was a vision of completely alien beauty. It
rose ten thousand feet from the skit-trees
about its base. Its base was two miles square.

“They build high,” said Wentworth grimly,
“so they won’t use any extra ground they
could plant their confounded skit-trees on,
I’m going to land short of it, Haynes.”

The vertical jets took over smoothly as he
cut the drive. The flier slowed, and two blasts
forward stopped it dead, and then it de-
scended smoothly. Wentworth had checked
not more than a hundred yards from the out-
ermost tower. It appeared to be made of
completely seamless metal, incised with in-
tricate decorative designs. Which was in-
credible.

But the most impossible thing of all was
that there was no movement anywhere. No
stirring. No shifting. Not even furtive
twinklings as of eyes peering from the
strangely-shaped window openings. And
when the flier landed gently between two
circular clumps of skit- trees and Wentworth
cut off the jets and turned off even the com-
municator — then there was silence.

The silence was absolute. Two miles high,
near them towered a city which could house
millions of people. And it was utterly with-
out noise and utterly without motion in any
part.

“And the prince went into the castle,” said
Wentworth savagely. “He kissed the Sleep-
ing Beauty on the lips, and she opened her
eyes with a glad little cry, and they were
married- and lived happily ever after. Com-
ing, Haynes?”

“Sure thing, said Haynes. “But I don’t kiss
anybody. I”m engaged!”

Wentworth got out of the flier. Never yet
had they found a single dangerous animal on
any of the nine planets on which skit-trees
grew, with the possible exception of what-
ever it was he had seen that morning. Who-
ever planted skit-trees had wiped out dan-
gerous fauna. That had been one of the few
seeming certainties. But all the same, Went-
worth put a flame-pistol in his belt before he
ventured into the city.

He stopped short. There was a flickering.
The city was blotted out. A blank metal wall
stood before him. It reared all around the
flier and the men in it. Between them and the
city. Shining, seamless, gleaming metal, cir-
cular and a hundred feet high. It neatly en-
closed a space two hundred yards across,

48 THRILLING WONDER STORIES

and hence some clumps of skit-trees with the
men, “Now, where the devil did that come
from?” asked Wentworth.

Abruptly everything went black. There
was darkness. Absolute, opaque.

F OR PERHAPS two seconds it was un-
broken. Then Haynes, still in the flier,
pushed the button that turned on the emer-
gency landing-lights. Twin beams of some
hundreds of thousands candlepower lashed
out, and recoiled from polished metal, and
spread around and were reflected and re-
reflected. There was a metal roof atop the
circular metal wall. Men and flier and clumps
of skit-trees were sealed up in a monstrous
metal cylinder. Wentworth cried furiously:
“It isn’t so! It simply can’t be so!”

He marched angrily to the nearest of the
metal walls. Twin shadows of his figure were
cast on before him by the landing-light
beams. Weird reflections of the shadows and
the lights — distorted crazily by the polished
surface — appeared on every hand.

He reached the metal wall. He pulled out
his flame-pistol and tapped at it. The wall
was solid. He backed off five paces and sent
a flame-pistol beam at it. The flame splashed
from the metal in a coruscating shower. But
nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. When
he turned off the pistol the metal was un-
marred. It was not even red-hot.

“The sleeping beauty woke up, Went-
worth,” Haynes said. “What’s the matter?”
He saw Wentworth gazing with stupefac-
tion at a place where the metal cylinder
touched ground. There was the beginning of
a circular clump of skit-trees. And he saw
a stalk at a slight angle. It came out of the
metal wall. The skit-trees were in the wall.
They came out of it. He saw another that
went into it.

He went back to the flier and climbed in.
He turned the communicator up to maximum
power. The racket that came out of it was
deafening. He punched the call-button.
Again and again and again. Nothing hap-
pened. He turned the set off. The dead still-
ness which followed was daunting.

“Well?” said Haynes.

“It’s impossible,” said Wentworth,” but I
can explain everything. That wall isn’t real.”
“Then we ram through it?”

“We’d kill ourselves!” Wentworth told him,
exasperated. “It’s solid!”

“Not real, but solid?” asked Haynes. “A
bit unusual, that. When I get back to Earth

and am a happily married man, I’ll try to
have a more plausible story than that to tell
my wife if I ever come home late, not that
I ever will.”

Wentworth looked at him. And Haynes
grinned. But there was sweat on his face,
Wentworth grunted.

“I’m scared too, but I don’t make bad jokes
to cover up,” he said sourly. “This can be
licked. It’s got to be!”

“What is it?”

“How do I know?” demanded Wentworth.
“It makes sense, though. A city that vanishes
and re-appears, apparently without anybody
in it. That doesn’t happen. This can — this
tank we’re in. There wasn’t any machinery
around to put up a wall like this.

“The top wasn’t heaved into place either.
It wasn’t lowered down to seal us in. It
didn’t slide into position. One instant it
wasn’t there, and the next instant it was.
Like something that — hm— had materialized
out of nowhere. Maybe that’s it! And the
city was the same sort of trick! Maybe that’s
the secret of this whole civilization we’re
trying to trace!”

His voice echoed weirdly against the metal
ceiling on every hand.

“What’s the secret?”

“Materializing things! Making a — synthetic
sort of matter! Making — well — force-fields
that look and act like substance! Of course!
If you can generate a building, why build
one? We can make a magnetic field with a
coil of wire and an electric current. It’s just
as real as a brick. It’s simply different from
a brick.

“We can make a picture on a screen. It’s
just as real as a painting. It’s just different.
Suppose we could make something like a
magnetic field, with shape and coloring and
solidity! Why not solidity? Given the trick,
it should be as easy as shape or color!

“If we had a trick like that and wanted
to stop some visitors from outer space, we’d
simply construct a solid image of a can
around them! It would be made of energy,
and all the energy applied to it would flow
to any threatened spot.

“It would draw power to fight any stress
that tried to destroy it Of course! And why
should we build cities? We’d clear a place for
them and generate them and maintain them
simply by supplying the power needed to
keep them in being! We’d make force-fields
in the shape of machines, to dig canals or pile
up dams.”

SKIT-TREE PLANET

H E HAD raised his voice as he spoke.

The solid walls and roof made echoes
which clanged. He stopped talking.

"Then there wouldn’t be any artifacts,”
Haynes said calmly. "When a city was
abandoned, it would be wiped out as com-
pletely as the picture on a theatre-screen
when the play is done with. But Went-
worth!”

“Eh?”

“If we had that trick, and we’d captured
some meddlesome strangers from outer space
by clapping a can over them, what would we
do?” He paused. “In other words, what
comes next for us?”

“Get in the pilot’s seat,” he commanded.
“Put your finger on the vertical flight button.
When you see light, stab it down so we’ll
shoot straight up! If we trapped somebody,
and if we lifted the trap we’d have something
worse than a trap to take care of them with.
They’d do the same, and they’ve got what it
should take!”

Silence followed.

“Such as?” Haynes asked at last.

“I saw one Thing this morning,” said
Wentworth grimly. “I don’t like to think
about it. If they’re bringing it over to snap
us up when this can is lifted off us, we’re up
against plenty of trouble. You keep your
finger on the flight-button! That Thing was
bigger than the Galloping Cow! I’ll try to tip
McRae off as to what’s happened.”

He settled down by the communicator.
Every ten minutes he tried to call the expedi-
tion’s ship. Every time there came a mon-
strous roar of static as the set came on. and
no other sound at all. Aside from that, noth-
ing happened. Absolutely nothing.

The flier lay on the ground with an un-
natural assortment of reflected and re-
reflected light-beams from the twin landing-
lamps. There were four clumps of skit-trees
sharing the prison with the flier and the men.

Silence. Stillness. Nothing. Every ten
minutes Wentworth called the Galloping
Cow. It was an hour and a half before there
came an answer to Wentworth’s call.

“ — llo!” came McRae’s voice through the
crackling static. “Down in — gain — ■ no
sign — sort anywhere — ”

“Get a directional on me!” snapped Went-
worth. “Can you hear me above the static?”
“What sta — voice perfectly clear — ” came
McRae’s booming. “Keep — talking. . . .”
Wentworth blinked. No static at the Gal-
loping Cow ? When his ears were practically

deafened? Then it made sense. All of it!

“I’ll keep talking!” he said fervently. “Use
the directional and locate me! But don’t try
to help me direct! Take a bearing from
where you find me to where a fifty-foot dirt
embankment sticks out from a mountain -
spur to the north. Get on that line and you’ll
hear the static, all right.

“It’s in a beam coming right here at me.
Follow that static back to the mountains, and
when you find where it’s being projected
from, you’ll find some skit-tree planters with
all the artifacts your little heart desires.
Only maybe you’ll have to blast them.”

He swallowed.

“It works out to sense,” he went on more
calmly. “They built up a civilization based
on generating instead of building the things
they wanted to use. Our force-fields are
globular, because the generator’s inside. If
you want a force-field to have a definite
shape, you have to generate it differently.
Their cities and their machines weren’t sub-
stance, though they were solid enough. They
were force-fields!

“The generators were off at a distance,
throwing the force -field they wanted where
they needed it. They projected solidities
like we projected pictures on a screen. They
projected their cities. Their tools. Probably
their spaceships too! That’s why we never
found artifacts. We looked where installa-
tions had been, instead of where they were
generated and flung to the spot where they
were wanted. There’s a beam full of static
coming from those mountains.”

Light! With all the blinding suddenness of
an atomic explosion, there was light. Went-
worth had a moment’s awareness of sun-
shine on the brittle stalks of skit-trees, and
then of upward acceleration so fierce that it
was like a blow. The atmosphere-flier
hurtled skyward with all its lift- jets firing
full blast, and there was the Galloping Cow
lumbering ungracefully through atmosphere
at ten thousand feet, some twelve or more
miles away.

M cRAE’S voice came out of a communi-
cator which now picked up no static
whatever.

“What the devil?” he boomed. "We saw
something that looked like a big metal tank,
and it vanished and you went skyward from
where it’d been like a bat out of a cave.”
“Suppose you follow me,” said Wentworth
grimly. “The skit-tree planters on this

48 THRILLING WONDER STORIES

planet, anyhow, don’t want us around. By
pure accident, I got a line on where they
were. They lured me away from their place
by projecting a city.

“I went to look, and it vanished. I played
hide and seek with it until they changed
tactics and let it stay in existence. Maybe
they thought we’d land on it, high up, and
get out of the flier to explore.

“Then the city would have vanished and
we’d have dropped a mile or two, hard. But
we landed on the ground instead, and they
clapped a jail around us.

“I don’t know what they intended, but you
came along and they let the jail vanish to
keep you from examining it. And now we’ll
go talk to them!”

The flier was streaking vengefully back to
the embankment to where only that morning,
before sunrise, Wentworth had seen some-
thing he still didn’t like to think about.

The Galloping Cow veered around to fol-
low, with all the elephantine grace of the
animal for which she had been unofficially
christened She’d been an Earth-Pluto
freighter before conversion for the expedi-
tion, and she was a staunch vessel, but not a
handy one.

The flier dived for the hills. Wentworth’s
jaws were hard and angry. The Galloping
Cow trailed, wallowing. The flier quartered
back and forth across the hills, examining
every square inch of ground.

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The search
went on. The communicator boomed.

“They’re playing ’possum,” McRae’s voice
said. “We’ll land and make a camp and pre-
pare to hunt on foot.”

Wentworth growled angrily. He continued
to search. Deeper and deeper the flier went
into the hills, going over and over every bit
of terrain. Then, quite suddenly, the com-
municator emitted babbling sounds. Shout-
ings. Incoherent outcries. From the ship,
of course. There were sudden, whining
crashes, electronic cannon going off at a
panic-stricken rate. Then a ghastly crashing
sound, and silence. The flier zoomed until
Haynes and Wentworth could see. They
paled. Wentworth uttered a raging cry.

The Galloping Cow had landed. Her ports
were open and men had emerged. But now
a Thing had attacked the ship with a ruth-
less, irresistible ferocity. It was bigger than
the Galloping Cow. It stood a hundred feet
high at the shoulder. It was armored and
possessed of prodigious jaws and gigantic

teeth. It was all the nightmares of mecha-
nistic minds rolled into one.

It must have materialized from nothing-
ness, because nothing so huge could have
escaped Wentworth’s search. But as Went-
worth first looked at it, the incredible jaws
closed on the ship’s frame and bit through
the tough plates of beryllium steel as if they
had been paper. It tore them away and flung
them aside.

A mainframe girder offered resistance.
With an irresistible jerk, the Thing tore it
free. And then it put its claws into the very
vitals of the Galloping Cow and began to
tear the old spaceship apart.

The crewmen spilled out and fled. The
Thing snapped at one as he went but re-
turned to its unbelievable destruction. Some-
one heaved a bomb into its very jaws, and it
exploded, and the Thing seemed not to notice.

Wentworth seized the controls of the flier
from Haynes. He dived, not for the ship, but
for the space between the ship and the
mountains. He flung the small craft into
crazy, careening gyrations in that space.

And then the communicator shrieked with
clacking static. The flier passed through the
beam, but Wentworth flung it back in. He
plunged toward the mountains. He lost the
beam, and found it again, and lost it and
found it.

“There!” he said, choking with rage.
“Down from the top of that cliff. There’s a
hole — a cave-mouth. The beam’s coming
from there!”

He plunged the flier for the opening, and
braked with monstrous jetting that sent
rocket-fumes blindingly and chokingly into
the tunnel. The flier hit, and Wentworth
scrambled to the forepart of the little ship
and leaped to the cliff-opening against which
it bumped. Then he ran into the opening,
his flame-pistol flaring before him.

T HERE was a blinding flash inside. The
blue-white flame of a short-circuit
created a gigantic arc. It died. The place was
full of smoke, and something small ran feebly
across the small space that Wentworth could
see, and fell, and kicked feebly, and was still.
Wentworth could hear a machine come to a
jolting stop. And crouching there fiercely,
he waited for more antagonists.

None came. The fumes drifted out the
cave-mouth. Then he could see the Thing on
the floor. Clad in a weirdly constructed
space-suit, the creature he had knocked over

SKIT-TREE PLANET 49

was not human and looked very tired. It was
dead. Next he saw an almost typical tight-
beam projector, linked with heavy cables to
a scanning device.

He saw a model — all of five feet high — of
the city he and Haynes had tried to reach.
The model was of unbelievable delicacy and
perfection. But the scanning system now was
focused on a metal object which was a min-
iature Thing with claws and jaws and armor.

It was two feet long, and there was a cable
control by which its movements could be
directed. A solidity which was controlled by
that ingenious mechanical toy could dig
canals, or gather the crop from the tops of
skit-trees — when enlarged in the projection
to stand a hundred feet high at the shoulder
— or it could tear apart a spaceship as a ter-
rier rends a rat.

There was more. Much more. But there
had been only the one small Inhabitant, who
wore a space-suit on his own planet. And he
was dead. Haynes’ voice came from the flier
at the cave-mouth. “Wentworth! What’s
happened? Are you alive? What’s up?”

Wentworth went out, still in a savage
mood. He wanted to see how the Galloping
Cow had withstood the attack. What he had
seen last looked bad.

It was bad. The Galloping Cow was a car-
cass. Her enginess were not too badly smash-
ed, but her outer shell was scrap-iron, her
frame was twisted wreckage, and there was
no faintest hope that they could repair her.

“And — I’m engaged to be married when
we get back,” said Haynes, white-faced.
“We’ll never get back in that.”

*****

Less than a month later, though, the Gal-
loping Cow did head for home. Haynes, un-
wittingly, had made it possible. Examination
of the solidity-projector revealed its prin-
ciples, and Haynes — trying forlornly to make
a joke— suggested that he model a statuette
of the last Inhabitant to be projected a mile
or two high above the skit-tree plantations
now forever useless.

But he was commissioned to model some-
thing else entirely, and in his exuberance his
fancy wandered afar. But McRea dourly per-
mitted the model to stand, because he was in
a hurry to start. *

So that, some six weeks from the morning
when Wentworth had seen an impossible
Thing moving in the gray dawnlight on an
unnamed planet, the Galloping Cow was al-
most back in touch with humanity. Two

weeks more, and the outposts of civilization
on Rigel would be reached.

A long, skeleton tower had been built out
from the old ship’s battered remnant. A
scanner scanned, and a beam-type projector
projected the image of Haynes’ modeling to
form a solid envelope of force-field about the
ship. It was much larger than the original
hull had been. There would be room and to
spare on the voyage home. And Haynes was
utterly happy.

“Think!” he said blissfully, in the scan-
ning-room where the force-field envelope
was maintained about the ship. “Two weeks
and Rigel! Two months and home! Two
months and one day and I’m a married man!”
Wentworth looked at the small moving ob-
ject on which the scanners focused.

“You’re a queer egg, Haynes,” he said.
“I don’t believe you ever had a solemn
thought in your head. Do you know what
wiped out those people?”

“A boojum?” asked Haynes mildly. “Tell
me!”

“The biologists figured it out,” said Haynes.
“A plague. The last poor devil wore a space-
suit to keep the germs out. It seems that
some wrecked Earth-ship drifted out to
to where one of their explorers found it. And
they hauled it to ground. They learned a
lot, but there were germs on board they
weren’t used to. Coryzia, for instance.

“In their bodies it had an incubation period
of about six .months, and was highly con-
tagious all the time. Then it turned lethal.
They didn’t know about It in time to establish
quarantines. No wonder the poor devil
wanted to kill us! We’d wiped out his race!”
“Too bad!” said Haynes. He looked down
at the small moving thing he had modeled for
a new hull for the Galloping Cow.

“You know,” he said blithely, “I like this
model! I may not be the best sculptor in the
world — as an amateur I wouldn’t expect it.
But for a while after we land on earth. I’m
going to be the most famous man alive.”
And he beamed at the jerkily moving ob-
ject which was the model for the hull of the
Galloping Cow. It was twelve hundred feet
long, as it was projected about the old ship’s
engine-room and remaining portions. It hr
a stiffly extended tail and an outstretched
neck and curved horns. Its legs extended
and kicked, and extended and kicked.

The Galloping Cow, in fact, exactly fitted
her name by her outward appearance, as sne
galloped Earthward through emptiness.

The

GREGORY

CIRCLE

An Astonishing Novelet

By WILLIAM FITZGERALD

Trying to connect hillbilly mechanic
Bud Gregory with the mysterious atom-
ic dust destroying America was like
joining simple math and nuclear phy-
sics, but Dr. Murfree found the answer!

CHAPTER I
Chain Disaster

O N MONDAY Bud Gregory sat in
magnificent idleness before the shed
which was his automobile repair-
shop in the village of Brandon on the edge of
the Great Smokies.

That day something impalpable and invisi-
ble descended upon Cincinnati and people
began to go to hospitals with their blood
undergoing changes over which the doctors
threw up their hands.

On Tuesday Bud Gregory meditated doing
some work on the four automobiles awaiting
repair in his shop, but did not feel like work-
ing and went fishing instead. . . .

On that day the Geiger counters in the
Bureau of Standards in Washington went uni-
formly crazy, so that it was impossible to
standardize the by-products of the atomic
piles turning out nuclear explosive for na-
tional defense.

On Wednesday Bud Gregory reluctantly
put in half an hour’s work. Yawning, he took
his pay for the job and went home and took
a nap.

That day forty head of cattle on a West
Virginia hillside lay down and died and a
trout-stream in Georgia was found to be full
of dead fish. Four cancer-patients in a home

Cregory threw a clumsy, homemade

for incurables in Frankfort, Kentucky, sud-
denly took a quite impossible turn for the
better. They walked out of the hospital three
weeks later and went back to work.

On Thursday Bud Gregory —

That was the way of it at the beginning.
Bud Gregory seemed to have no connection
with any one of the series of unusual events.
The events themselves were simply prepos-
terous. As, for example, the fact that all the
foliage in a ten-mile patch of mountain coun-
try in Pennsylvania turned vaguely purplish
overnight, and then wilted and turned to un-
wholesome pulp.

Three days later there was not a green
leaf or a living blade of grass in thirty-odd
square miles. That did not seem to have any
rational connection with Bud Gregory or any
other event. But the connection was there.

switch — and the earth rocked!

It was Dr. David Murfree of the Bureau of
Standards who was the first to add the vari-
ous items together to a plausible sum. It did
not include a backwoods automobile repair-
man, of course — there was no data for that —
but it was a very sound guess just the same.

Murfree was a physicist, not a doctor of
medicine and his salary at the Bureau was
four thousand two hundred dollars a year
with an appropriate Civil Service rating. He
added the several odd events together, and
they were convincing. But the answer was
apparently impossible. He could not get any
of his superiors in the Bureau to agree with
him on the need for action. He thought the
need was very great indeed. So he took a
certain amount of accumulated Civil Service
leave, drew out five hundred dollars from his
bank and drove off in his battered old car

to investigate at his own expense.

Tucked in the car were certain items of
equipment from the bureau which he had no
right to borrow and which would take most
of a year’s pay to replace if anything should
happen to them.

He went to the sere and barren area in
Pennsylvania and made certain tests. He
drove to Cincinnati and made more tests. He
went on to the place in West Virginia where
cattle had died and asked questions and did
improbable things to other ailing cows and
steers. Then he drove back to Washington at
the best speed his rattletrap car could make.

He went first to his home and told his wife
to pack up. He explained with crisp precision
and she looked at him in frightened doubt.
He went to the Bureau of Standards — he was
still technically on leave— and showed the

52 THRILLING WONDER STORIES

results of his tests to some of the men who
worked with him.

They were still unable to use the Geiger
Counters in the bureau, but one of his friends
was heading for New York to use apparatus
at Columbia which had not gone haywire.
Murfree got him to take along his samples.

Then he went to a friend who happened to
be a meteorologist — and got confirmatory bad
news. The weather-maps of the period cover-
ing the unexplained phenomena told him just
how likely his surmise was and where a
search should be made for the primary cause
of the disasters.

rp^HEN Murfree piled his wife and small
j£i daughter in the car, drew out all the rest
of the money he had in the bank and headed
for the Great Smokies.

It was strictly logical action. Epidemic
leukemia in Cincinnati, ruined Geiger coun-
ters in Washington, dead cattle in West Vir-
ginia, dead trout in Georgia, the sudden cure
of cancer patients in Frankfort, Kentucky —
and a ten-mile patch of dead vegetation in
Pennsylvania.

If Murfree could have gotten someone in
authority to listen to him the measures to be
taken would have been quicker and much
more drastic. But nobody would listen. So
Murfree had to work it out on his own.

His car was old but he made Lynchburg
the first day. He was not at ease. He got
started early on the second day and, by night-
fall, was well past Charlotte toward the
mountains. He and his family stopped at a
small country hotel and, during the evening,
Murfree got into talk with a power-line man,
who told him worriedly that power-line
losses over three counties had gone up to
seven times normal in two days in a smooth
curve and now were headed down again.

There was no explanation. Murfree fidget-
ed when he heard it. He made his family
sleep with closed windows that night in spite
of the stuffiness of their rooms, and they
started off again near daybreak.

It was about three in the afternoon when
he met Bud Gregory.

Bud Gregory sat in splendid somnolence
before the shed which was his repair shop.
The village of Brandon was a metropolis of
three hundred souls, not far within the Great
Smokies. There were mountains in every
direction. There was blue sky overhead.
There was red clay underfoot.

Bud Gregory dozed contentedly. There

were three cars awaiting his attention. Each
of them had been brought to him solely be-
cause he was the best mechanic in seven
states. Actually, he was much more than
that — so much more that there is no word
for what he was.

Each car had been brought reluctantly,
because he would repair them only when he
felt like it or needed money, and then would
do in minutes a job anybody else would need
hours or days to do. At the moment he did
not feel like working and he did not need
money. So he dozed.

Flies buzzed about him. Insects made nois-
es off in the distance. Somewhere chickens
cackled feebly and somewhere a wagon with
a squeaky wheel moved sedately away from
Brandon.

Murfree’s car was plainly in trouble when
Bud Gregory first heard it. Not many cars
came through Brandon. The local highways
were traversable by very light vehicles and
they could be traveled by tractors, but mules
were surest. This car was away off the main
track.

It came on, booming, and Bud Gregory
awoke. It climbed rather desperately over
a red-clay hill and came into Brandon. It
was heavily loaded. Murfree drove. There
were a woman and a little girl in the back.
The rest was luggage — bags and parcels of
every possible shape and size and outward
appearance.

But Bud Gregory looked at the car. Mur-
free saw his sign and steered the car toward
it. He stopped it — but the motor continued to
run. Murfree plainly turned off the ignition.
The motor boomed on. Murfree got out and
called to Bud above the noise of the engine.

“It won’t stop.”

Bud rose, slouched to the car and threw
up the hood. He reached in. There were
thunderous racketing explosions. The motor
stopped dead. Then it made frying, cooking
noises.

“Y’lucky,” Bud drawled. “Didn’t bum out
no bearin’s yet.” Then he drawled again.
“Pump-shaft broke, huh?”

“Yes,” Murfree said bitterly. “I kept going
in hope of coming on a repair shop. Can you
fix it? Will the motor freeze up?”

Bud spoke negligently, looking at the car
and all the parcels.

“Uh-huh. Oil’s all burnt up in the cylin-
ders. When she cools she freezes. But if you
pour water in ’er now you’ll bust the cylin-
der-block.”

Murfree clamped his jaws,
clenched.

He wasn’t far enough into the Smokies for
his needs and that power-line-loss business
meant that he had to hurry.

“Any chance of getting another car?” he
asked desperately.

B UYING another car would put an im-
possible dent in his resources but he
felt that the matter was urgent enough to
justify such a step. He had two possible
courses of action — this, and flight to the
farthest possible part of the West. He’d
chosen this because it meant a fight against
the danger he foresaw.

“This here’s a pretty good car,” Bud Greg-
ory drawled. “Fix ’er up an’ she’ll be all
right.”

“But it’ll take days!” said Murfree bitterly.
“You’ve got to take the motor practically
apart!”.

Bud Gregory spat with vast precision at
a cluster of flies about a previous splash of
tobacco-juice.

“She’ll take a coupla hours to cool,” he
said drily. “That’s all. No bearin’s burnt.
Ain’t never yet seen a car I couldn’t fix. I
got a kinda knack for it.”

“But you’ve got to take off the cylinder-
head!” protested Murfree. “And replace the
rings and fix the valves and take the pump
apart and get a new shaft! No garage in the
world would undertake the job in less than
four days!”

“I’ll do it,” said Bud Gregory, “in two
hours an’ a half. An’ two hours’ll be waitin’
for it to cool.”

He grinned. He wasn’t boasting. He was
showing off a little, perhaps. But he was
saying something he knew with absolute
knowledge.

Murfree threw up his hands.

“Do that,” he said bitterly, “and I’ll believe
in miracles!”

He got his wife and small daughter out of
the car. He led them down to the general
store of Brandon, which sold fertilizer, dry-
goods, harness, perfumery, canned goods,
farm machinery and general supplies. He
bought the materials for a picnic lunch and he
and his family came back. They sat in the
car, with the doors open for coolness, and
ate.

But Murfree was uneasy. Bud Gregory
dozed. Time passed. The crackling, frying
sounds of the overheated motor dwindled

and ceased.

Presently Murfree got out and paced up
and down beside the car, restlessly.

After a time he went to the back and took
out a small, heavy parcel. He opened it and
there was a freakish-looking metal-lined
glass tube with electrical connections plainly
showing it to be akin to radio tubes, but of
a completely different shape.

Murfree threw a tiny switch, and from
somewhere inside the box a “click” sounded.
A moment later, there was another. Then
two clicks close together, and a pause, and
another.

Murfree watched it, worried. It clicked
briskly but unrhythmically.

There was no order in the sequence of tiny
sounds.

Bud Gregory sat somnolently in the shade.
He turned his eyes and regarded Murfree
and the box.

“What good does that do?” Murfree’s
wife said.

“None at all,” Murfree said wretchedly. “It
only tells me nothing’s happened to us yet.”

H E STOOD watching the box, in which
nothing moved at all, but from which
clickings came at brief intervals.

Chickens cackled. Somewhere a horse
cropped at grass and the sound of its jaws
was audible. Insects hummed and buzzed
and stridulated.

The box clicked.

Bud Gregory got up and came over curi-
ously. He regarded the box with an interest-
ed intentness. It was not an informed look,
as of someone looking at a familiar object.
It wasn’t even a puzzled look, as of someone
trying to solve the meaning of something
strange. He wore exactly the absorbed ex-
pression of a man who picks up an unfamil-
iar book and reads it and finds it fascinat-
ing.

“What’s — uh — what’s this here thing do?”
asked Bud, drawling.

“It’s a Geiger counter,” said Murfree. He
had no idea what Bud was. Nobody had.
Not even Bud. But Murfree said, “It counts
cosmic-ray impacts and neutrons. It’s a de-
tector for cosmic rays and radioactivity.”
Bud’s face remained uncomprehending.
“Don’t mean nothing to me,” he drawled.
“Kinda funny, though, how it works. Some-
thin’ hits, an’ current goes through, an’ then
it cuts off till somethin’ else hits. What you
want it for?”

THE GREGORY CIRCLE

His hands

THRILLING WONDER STORIES

CHAPTER II

Miracle

I T WAS genuine curiosity. But an ordi-
nary man, looking at a Geiger counter,
does not understand that a tiny particle at
high velocity — so small that it passes through
a glass tube and a metal lining without hin-
drance — makes a Geiger tube temporarily
conductive. Murfree stared blankly at Bud
Gregory.

“How the heck — ” Then he said curiously,
“It was invented to detect radiations that
come from nobody knows where. And it’s
used in the plants that make atom bombs, to
tell when there’s too much radioactivity —
too much for safety.”

“I heard about atom bombs,” Bud Gregory
drawled. “Never knew how they worked.”
Murfree, still curious, spoke in words as
near to one syllable as he could. This man
had said he could make an impossible repair
and had the air of knowing what he was talk-
ing about.

He looked at a Geiger counter and he knew
how it worked and had not the least idea
what it was used for. Murfree gave him a
necessarily elementary account of atomic
fission. He was appalled at the inadequacy
of his explanation even as he finished it.
But Bud Gregory drawled:

“Oh, that — mmm — I get it. Them little
things that knock that ura — ura — uranium
stuff to flinders are the same kinda things
that make this dinkus work. They kinda
knock a little bit of air apart when they hit
it. I bet they change one kinda stuff to
another kind, too, if enough of ’em hit. Huh?”
Murfree jumped a foot. This lanky and ig-
norant backwoods repairman had absorbed
highly abstruse theory, put into a form so
simplified that it practically ceased to have
any meaning at all, and had immediately de-
duced the fact of ionization of gases by neu-
tron collision. And the transmutation of ele-
ments! He not only understood but could use
his understanding. .

“Right interestin’,” said Bud Gregory and
yawned. “I reckon your motor’s cool enough
to work on.”

He put his hand on the cylinder-block. It
was definitely hot, but not hot enough to
scorch his fingers.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll fix the pumpshaft
first.”

He went languidly to a well beside the re-
pair shed. He drew a bucket of water. He
poured it into the radiator. There was a very
minor hissing, which ceased immediately. He
filled the radiator, reached down and worked
at the pumpshaft with his fingers and with a
speculative, distant look in his eyes, then
straightened up.

He shambled into the shed and came out,
trailing a long, flexible cable behind him. Up
to the very edge of the Smokies and for a
varying distance into them, there is no vil-
lage so small or so remote that it does not
have electric power. He put a round wooden
cheesebox on the running-board of the car
and drew out two shorter cables with clips on
their ends. He adjusted them.

Murfree saw an untidy tangle of wires and
crude hand-wound coils in the box. There
were three cheap radio tubes. Bud Gregory
turned on a switch and leaned against the
mud-guard, waiting with infinite leisureli-
ness.

“What’s that?” asked Murfree, indicating
the cheesebox.

“Ain’t got any name,” said Bud Gregory.
“Somethin’ I fixed up to weld stuff with. It’s
weldin’ your shaft.” He looked absently into
the distance. “It saves a lotta work,” he
added without interest.

“But — but you can’t weld a shaft without
taking it out!” protested Murfree. “It’d
short!”

Bud Gregory yawned.

“This don’t. It’s some kinda stuff them
tubes make. It don’t go through iron. It just
kinda bounces around. Where there’s a
break, it heats up an’ welds. When it’s all
welded it just bounces around.”

Murfree swallowed. He walked around
the car and looked at the apparatus in the
cheesebox. He traced leads with his eyes. His
mouth opened and closed.

“But that can’t do anything!” he protested.
“The current will just go around and
around!”

“All right.,” said Bud Gregory. “Just as
y’please.”

He waited patiently. Presently there was
a faint humming noise. Bud Gregory turned
off the switch and reached down. He re-
moved the connecting clamps and meditative-
ly fumbled with the water pump.

"That’s okay,” he finally said. “Try it if
y’like.”

THE GREGORY CIRCLE 55

H E POKED in the cheesebox, changing
connections apparently at random.
Murfree reached down and fingered the wat-
er-pump. He had made certain of the trouble
with his car and he knew exactly how the
broken shaft felt. Now it was perfect, exact-
ly as if it had been taken out, welded,
smoothed, trued and replaced.

“It feels all right!” said Murfree incred-
ulously.

“Yeah,” said Bud Gregory. “It is. Y’car’s
froze, now, though. Take the handle an’ try
it.”

Murfree got out the starting-handle from
the tool-box. He inserted it and strained.
The motor was frozen solid. It could not be
stirred. Murfree felt sick.

“Wait a minute,” said Bud Gregory, “an’
try again.”

He put a single one of the clamps on the
motor and tucked the other away in the
cheesebox. He turned on the switch.

“Heave now,” he suggested.

Murfree heaved — and almost fell over.
There was no resistance to the movement of
the motor except compression which was
infinitely springy. There was no friction
whatever. It moved with an incredible, fluid
ease. It had never moved so effortlessly —
though the compression remained as perfect
as it had ever been. Murfree stared. Bud
Gregory took off the clamp.

“Try again,” he said, grinning.

With all his strength. Murfree could not
move the motor. Overheated, it was frozen
tight with all the oil burned from the inner
surface of the cylinders. Yet an instant be-
fore —

“Yeah,” said Bud Gregory, drily.

He threw on the ignition switch, got into
the driver’s seat, and stepped on the starter.
The motor fairly bounced into life. It ran
smoothly. He adjusted it to a comfortable
idling speed and got out.

“We’ll run ’er for ten-fifteen minutes,” he
said casually, “to get fresh oil spread around.
Then you’ all fixed.”

Murfree simply goggled.

“How does that work?” he said blankly.
Bud Gregory shrugged.

“Steel is little hunks of stuff stickin’ to-
gether. These tubes make a kinda stuff that
makes the outside ones slide easy on each
other. I fixed up this dinkus to help loosen
nuts that was too tight an’ for workin’ on
axles an’ so on. That’ll be five dollars. Okay?”
“Y-yes — my word!” said Murfree. He

fumbled out his wallet and turned over a
five-dollar bill. “Listen! You eliminated fric-
tion! Completely! There wasn’t any fric-
tion! Where’d you get the idea for that
thing?”

Bud Gregory yawned.

“It just come to me. I gotta knack for fixin’
things.”

“It should be patented!” said Murfree fe-
verishly. “What’ll you make one of these for
me for?”

Bud Gregory grinned lazily.

“Too much trouble. Took me a day an’ a
half to put it together an’ get it workin’. I
don’t like that kinda work.”

“A hundred dollars? Five hundred? And
royalties?”

Bud Gregory shrugged.

“Too much trouble,” he said. “I get
along. Don’t aim to work myself to death.
You can go along now. Your car’s all right.”

He shambled over to his chair. He seated
himself with an air of infinite relaxation and
leaned back against the corner of the shed.
As Murfree drove away he raised one hand
in utterly lazy farewell.

But Murfree drove down the red-clay road,
marveling. There had been only a two-hour
delay instead of the four to seven days that
any other garage in the world would have
needed. Murfree drove to what he believed
would be either the only safe place within
a thousand miles — that or the place where
he and his family would definitely be killed.
But for a while he did not think of that.

He was facing the slowly-realized fact
that Bud Gregory was something that there
isn’t yet a word for. He could not yet rea-
lize the full significance of the discovery, but
it was startling enough to knock out of his
head — for the moment — even the deadly
danger implied by leukemia in Cincinnati
and dead grass in Pennsylvania and dead
trout in Georgia and Geiger counters gone
crazy in Washington.

Murfree still didn’t connect Bud Gregory
with the danger.

CHAPTER III
Hidden Connection

EATH fell out of a rain cloud in Kan-
sas. A driving summer rainstorm swept
across the wheatfields of the plains and

58 THRILLING WONDER STORIES

where it fell the growing wheat died. The
occupants of every farmhouse on which
the rainstorm beat died too in a matter of
days.

The Mississippi River became a stinking
broth of dead and rotting fish above St.
Louis and the noisesomeness floated down-
stream to poison the water all the way to
the Gulf — and beyond.

Dead birds fell from the skies over a dozen
states and where they fell the earth went
barren in little round spaces about them. A
patch of the Gulf Stream turned white with
dead fish. A game-preserve in Alabama be-
came depopulated.

There were three hundred deaths in one
night in Louisville. There were sixty in Chi-
cago. The Tennessee Valley power- generat-
ing plant blew out every dynamo in five
hectic minutes, during which sheet-lightning
hurtled all about the interior of the genera-
tor-buildings.

Then death struck Akron, Ohio. Every-
body knows about that — twelve thousand
people in three days, and a whole section
of the city roped off and nobody allowed to
enter it, and the dogs and cats and even the
sparrows writhing feebly on the streets be-
fore they too died.

It was radioactive dust that had done it.
And Oak Ridge was blamed as the only
possible source of radioactive dust and gas
which could kill capriciously at a distance
of hundreds of miles.

The newspapers raged. Congressmen — at
home between sessions — leaped grandilo-
quently into print with infuriated demands
for a special session of Congress in order
that an investigation might be launched to
fix responsibility — as if fixing responsibility
would end the continuing disasters.

Eminent statesmen announced forthcom-
ing laws which would destroy utterly every
trace of atomic science in the United States
and make it a capital offense to try to keep
the United States in a condition either to de-
fend itself or to keep abreast of the rest of
the world.

Oak Ridge was shut down and every uran-
ium pile dismantled — this to appease the
public — and every available investigator was
dispatched to Oak Ridge to uncover the
appalling carelessness which had killed as
many victims as a plague.

The only trouble was that all this indig-
nation was baseless. Radioactive dust and
gases were the cause of the deaths to be

sure. But the Smyth Report had pointed out
the danger from such by-products of chain-
reaction piles and elaborate precautions had
been taken against them.

The material which killed had not come
from Oak Ridge. It couldn’t have. Murfree
had never even suspected it. The amount of
dust was wrong. The amount of deadly stuff
necessary to produce the observed effects
simply couldn’t have come from the atom
piles in operation.

It was too much — and besides it would
have killed anybody in its neighborhood at
the point of its release into the air. And no-
body had died at Oak Ridge. It came from
somewhere else.

Picking his way desperately into the heart
of the Smokies Murfree kept track of events
by his car radio. Two hundred miles in —
the roads were so bad that a hundred -mile
journey was a good ten hour’s drive — there
was enough data for a rough calculation of
the amount of dust and gases that must have
been released.

When Murfree made his calculation sweat
broke out all over his body. Such a quantity
of fissioning material could not result from
a man-made atomic pile. The piles that men
had made were as large as were readily con-
trollable. This was incomparably larger.

All the piles at Oak Ridge and at Hand-
ford in Washington together could not pro-
duce a twentieth or a hundredth of the stuff
that had been released. Somehow, some-
where, a chain reaction had been started
with so monstrous an amount of material
to work on that it staggered the imagina-
tion. And it was increasing! It seemed to be
growing like a cancer!

Whatever had begun a chain reaction out-
side of Oak Ridge and Handford and however
it had become possible, it staggered the .imag-
ination. The output of murderous by-pro-
ducts increased day by day. It was building
up to an unimaginable climax.

T HERE was no danger of an atomic ex-
plosion, of course. An atomic pile does
not blow up. But by the amount of by-pro-
ducts released, something on the order of a
small but increasing volcano -was at work
somewhere. Instead of giving off relatively
harmless gases and smoke, it gave off the
most deadly substances known to men.

There could be no protection against such
invisible death. Poured into the air at suf-
ficiently high level — doubtless carried up by a

THE GREGORY CIRCLE 57

column of hot air — finely-divided dust and
deadly gas could travel for hundreds of miles
before touching earth. Apparently they did.
Where they touched earth, nothing could
live.

Not only did living things die after breath-
ing in the deadly stuff but the ground itself
became murderous. To walk on an area where
the ground emitted radioactive radiation was
to die. To breathe the air exposed to those
rays. . . .

Murfree went desperately on in his search
for the impossible source of the invisible car-
riers of death. He found the first evidence
that he was on the right track a hundred
miles from a telephone. He was far beyond
powerlines and railroads. He was in that
Appalachian Highlands, where life and lan-
guage is a hundred years behind the rest of
America.

He stopped to buy food and ask hopeless
questions at a tiny, unbelievably primitive
store. He tried the Geiger counter. And it
clicked measurably more often than before.
Twenty miles farther on its rate of clicking
had gone up fifty percent. He spent a day in
seemingly aimless wandering, driving the
laboring car over roads that had never be-
fore known pneumatic tires.

Then he left his wife and daughter as
boarders in a hillbilly cabin. His wife was
not easy about it. She protested.

“But what will happen to us?” she asked
desperately. “I want to share whatever hap-
pens to you, David!”

Murfree was not a particularly heroic per-
son. He was frankly scared. But he spoke
firmly.

“Listen, my dear! Something like a ura-
nium pile has started up somewhere in these
hills. It’s on a scale that nobody’s ever imag-
ined before. It’s so big that it’s incredible
that human beings could have started it. It’s
pouring out radioactive dust and gases into
the air. They’re being spread by the winds.
Where the stuff lands everything dies.

“And the pile is increasing in size and
violence. If it keeps on increasing, it will
make at least this continent uninhabitable,
and it may destroy all the life in the world.
Not only all human life but every bird and
beast and even the fish in the ocean deeps.
And something’s got to be done!”

“But—”

“I brought you so far with me,” said Mur-
free doggedly, “because you were no safer
in Washington than anywhere else. So far,

death from the thing is a matter of pure
chance. Wherever it’s happening the ground
must be so hot that a column of air rises
from it like smoke from a forest fire.

“But the place where there’s least smoke
from a fire is close to its edge. That’s why I
brought you this close. You’re safer here
than farther away and much safer than
you’d be closer.”

“But you intend to go on!” she protested.

“I’ve got a protective suit,” he told her. “I
managed to borrow one quite unlawfully from
the bureau. I couldn’t get more. If I can get
close enough to the thing to map it or simply
locate it drone planes can complete the ex-
ploration. But I’ve got to know, and I’ve got
to take back some sort of evidence.

“I’m going to be as careful as I can, my
dear. The only hope that exists is for me to
get back with accurate information. I’ll take
that to Washington and then I take you and
the kid as far away from here as what
money we have will carry us.”

“And if you don’t get back?”

“You’ll be safe here longer than anywhere
else,” he told her. “In the nature of things,
if the stuff rises up on a hot-air column, it
won’t start to drop until it’s a long way qff.

“We’re probably not more than a hundred
miles from whatever impossible thing a nat-
ural atomic pile is. I’m leaving you what
money I have. It will keep you here for
years. Unless something can be done, the
rest of America will be a desert long before
that time!

“I’m guessing,” he added gloomily, “but
nobody else is even doing that! They blame
Oak Ridge. But the weather-maps point
clearly to this area as the place from which
the dust must have been dispersed.”

It was not a sentimental parting. Murfree
was an earnest family man who happened
also to be a scientist. He had done what he
could for his family’s safety — and it wasn’t
much. But now he had to do something which
would most probably be quite futile, on the
remote chance that it could do some good.

If the source of radioactive dust- clouds
now drifting over America were a natural
phenomenon like a volcano, it was hardly
likely that anything could be done about it.
North America would probably become unin-
habitable in months or at most a year or
two. There might be some areas on the
West Coast where prevailing winds could
keep away the poison for a time, but it was
entirely possible that ultimately the whole

58 THRILLING WONDER STORIES

earth would become a desert of radioactive
sand and its seas empty of even microscopic
life.

So Murfree left his wife and daughter as
boarders in a hillbilly home a hundred and
twenty miles from a telephone and two hun-
dred miles from an electric light. He went
on to verify the danger that he seemed to be
the only living man to evaluate correctly.
He still did not connect Bud Gregory with
it.

CHAPTER IV
The Horror Hole

M OTORISTS drove shakily to doctors
in half a dozen cities, sick and fright-
ened. They had high fevers and all the symp-
toms of bums, but there was no sign of in-
jury upon their bodies.

Then it was observed that a patch of blight
had appeared upon a coastal highway. All
the vegetation in a space half a mile long
and three hundred yards wide had died over-
night. The highway ran through the blight-
ed area. All the motorists had driven through
it.

Fish died in a reservoir connected to a
great city’s water-supply system. The city’s
water was cut off and a desperate attempt
made to bring in drinking-water by tank-car.
Power-lines leading from Niagara Falls were
shorted by arcs which leaped across the air-
gap separating the wires. Then came the
deaths in Louisville.

Nobody thought about Murfree, of course.
He went on doggedly, unspectacularly, in
search of the thing he knew might mean the
depopulation of a continent and, of course,
his own death if he should succeed in finding
it. He went deeper and deeper into that
island of the primitive, the back country of
the Smokies.

There was no flat land. Mountains were
everywhere — spurs and crags and sprawling
monsters of stone, with blankets of forest to
their tips — patches of cornfield at slopes of
thirty and forty degrees. There were beard-
ed, ragged mountaineers with suspicion of
strangers as an instinct — barefooted broods
of tow-headed children — and mountains —
and more mountains — and more. . . .

Murfree’s progress was necessarily indirect,
because he could set onlv the vaguest of

bearings upon his objective. The Geiger
counter clicked ever more rapidly. On the
second day after he had left his wife be-
hind, Murfree put on his protective suit.

He looked more strange and aroused more
suspicion among the mountaineers. There
were no more roads, only trails, now. The
car, however, was lighter not only by the
absence of his wife and daughter, but by all of
their personal possessions.

He wormed his way along impossible paths,
fording small streams and climbing prohibi-
tive grades, while the noise of the Geiger
counter increased to a steady, minor roar. He
came to a mountain-cabin where nothing
moved.

A dog lay on the rickety porch, and did not
even raise its head to bark at him. Murfree
got out of his car and went to the cabin. He
had been so intent on the task of making
progress in the direction he wished to go,
that he had not noticed the fact that the fo-
liage here was dead in patches, that every-
thing which had been green looked sickly. He
called, and a feeble voice answered him.

The family in the house was dying. He
gave them water and stayed to prepare food
for them. There was absolutely nothing else
to be done. He knew what had happened, of
course. They had been burned — painlessly,
like sunburn — by the radiations from that
monstrous atomic furnace which somewhere
steadily poisoned the air. The bums went
deep into their bodies. They had high fe-
vers. They were languid and weak. They
looked like ghosts.

He asked questions and put food and water
handy for them. Then he went on. There
was nothing else to do.

Only four miles farther his car ceased to
have any power at all. A Geiger Counter
works because it is so designed that a single
cosmic ray or neutron, entering it and ioniz-
ing the gas within it, breaks down the insu-
lating properties of a partial vacuum and al-
lows a current to pass.

Here the air was so completely ionized that
it had become a partial conductor. The
spark-plugs spat small sparks. The timer
worked erratically. The ignition system went
haywire in air which permitted a current to
pass.

He got out o

He managed iu <.*rn it about, ready for
retreat. He heaved his portable Geiger
counter over his shoulder. He had a thin
sheet of cadmium to shield it, so that the

THE GREGORY CIRCLE 59

source of the neutrons which made it rattle
steadily could be detected. The cadmium ab-
sorbed part of the neutron-flood. It lessened
the counter’s rattling when between the tube
and the neutron-source.

He went on, on foot. Mountains reared
upward on every side, and there were thick
forests on every hand, but they were dead
or dying. Once in a mile or two he saw
small mountaineer cabins. They showed no
sign of life. He did not approach them. The
people in them were dead, or so near it that
nothing on earth could help them. And his
protective suit was not perfect.

In any case he was receiving already a
possibly dangerous dosage of radiation. Ev-
ery minute of continued exposure added to
his danger. He must get away as soon as he
dared. But he struggled onward, over a land-
scape more desolate than that of the moon,
because the moon has never known life, while
this knew only death.

He reached a crest which was actually a
pass between mountains. A steady wind blew
from behind him here, and the counter roar-
ed. The cadmium plate affected it, but not
too much. This must be the place for which
he searched. He went on.

Presently he could look downward and see
into a valley of dead trees and dead grass
and dead underbrush. In its center was a cir-
cular area a quarter-mile across which was —
which was somehow unspeakably horrifying.

It was bare, baked, yellowed earth. Not
even the corpses of once-growing things re-
mained upon it. It was simply red- clay
baked to a tawny orange, almost but not quite
at red heat, still baking from some monstrous
temperature down below.

Murfree saw dried leaves borne on the wind
toward it. They fluttered above it and crisp-
ed and carbonized and went skyward, smol-
dering. There was a steady column of air
rising from this hot place as from a chimney.

At the very edge of the round area was the
remnant of a log cabin. The side of the cabin
nearest the sere space had carbonized and
smoldered away to white ash. One wall had
collapsed, facing Murfree. Wires ran from
the cabin to a fence which precisely sur-
rounded the barren place, upheld on thin
metal rods. Sunlight glinted on glazed in-
sulators.

Murfree took field-glasses and looked into
the cabin. He saw a heap of ragged, scorched
clothing and something within it. He saw an
assemblage of improvised, untidy apparatus

from which glassy gleams were reflected. He
could make out no details.

Then he knew what had happened. It was
not reasonable. It was starkly impossible.
But it was no more impossible than welding
a water-pump shaft in its place or eliminating
all friction from a frozen-tight motor so that
it could be started again, or, say looking at
a Geiger Counter and understanding how
it worked without the least idea of what it
could be used for.

Murfree had a small camera and dutifully
took pictures without attempting to go clos-
er. He had no hope that the pictures would
turn out. The plates were surely fogged by
the radiation. He bent his cadmium plate
into a half-cylinder and did his best to make
sure of what he now unreasonably knew.

The results were not clean cut. They did
not have that precise clarity that a really
convincing test of a physical phenomenon
should possess. But the edge of the barren
area was sharp. It was distinct. And the
neutron-flood came from the air above the
bare space only.

Dust swirled up in little sand-devils above
the baked earth, and spun out to invisible
thinness in the column of air which rose,
spiraling to the sky. It rose and rose. The
air itself was radioactive, containing radio-
active oxygen and nitrogen and hydrogen —
from water-vapor— and all the elements in a
moisture-laden breeze. It was a chimney, a
whirlwind of death-laden heated gases ris-
ing to the skies. But the radioactivity of the
earth — which surely made the heat and the
poison — was somehow confined.

Murfree turned very quietly and went
away again. He knew that he had accom-
plished his task as he had first envisioned it.
He knew what poured deadly poison into the
air. He had seen it. He could tell how to
find it again. And so he must hurry.

His protective suit might or might not have
preserved his life. He might already be liter-
ally a dead man, though he still walked and
breathed and thought feverishly. If he
could have been sure that he would live to
descend into the valley and struggle to that
half-burned log cabin, and utterly smash
the vaguely-seen heap of wires and tubes
and hand-wound coils — and if he could have
been sure that it would not increase the men-
ace — he would have done it.

His own life seemed a very small price to
pay for the ending of that lifeless, motion-
less threat to the life of all the world.

m THRILLING WONDER STORIES

But he wasn’t sure. And the information
he had — especially the fact that he knew
what Bud Gregory was- — was so much more
important than his own life that he could
not risk the loss of what he had to tell.

On the way from the place he had found,
floundering on in the car that at first hardly
ran at all, and then- back through the tor-
tuous way past the mountainsides, of dying
trees and patches of dying cornfields and the
small and squalid cabins in which nothing
moved, and the spectacle of a world dying
about him, Murfree.hardly noticed the deso-
lation or thought about his own very probable
death.

He thought with a grim concentration of
Bud Gregory.

CHAPTER V

He Didn’t Know It Was Loaded

T HE CAR stopped again before the re-
pair-shed in Brandon. It was close to
sunset Bud Gregory sat in a leaned-back
chair against the corner of the shed. There
were eight cars waiting for him to feel like
working on them.

He opened his eyes and grinned lazily as
the car came to a stop. The sunset colorings
were magnificent. There was a strange, vast
quiet all about. It was the sunset hush. Mur-
free stopped the motor and got out.

“Car’s all right, ain’t it?” asked Bud Greg-
ory genially.

“The car’s all right,” said Murfree. “But
I v,’ant you to do something for me.”

“Not tonight,” said Bud Gregory. He
yawned. “I was thinkin’ about knockin’ off
an’ goin’ home to supper.”

Murfree pulled out his wallet. He had
thought it out carefully. An offer of too
much money wouldn’t mean a thing to this
man.

“I just want you to talk,” said Murfree.
“Five dollars for half an hour, just for tell-
ing me about that outfit you built for some-
body — that outfit that stops neutrons cold.”
Bud Gregory blinked at him.

“Neutrons,” Murfree reminded him, “are
the little bits of stuff that make the Geiger
counter — the funny radio tube — conduct
electricity. You made an outfit for somebody
that would stop them.”

Bud Gregory grinned.

“Now, how in heck did you know that?”
he asked, marveling. “That fella wasn’t like-
ly to tell nobody, an’ I ain’t!”

“I know!” said Murfree grimly. “That fel-
low wasn’t as smart as he thought he was.
He’s dead. That outfit killed him.”

Bud Gregory was startled. Then his grin
turned rueful.

“Serves ’im right,” he said uncomfortably,
“but it’s his own fault. I told him it was
dang’rous, but he done me a dirty trick. He
swore he was gonna law me for the way I
fixed his car. He said the way I fixed it, he
couldn’t sell it even if it would run.

“Then he says he'd call it square if I fixed
up another kinda gadget for ’im, but I was
gonna go to jail or have to pay for his car
if I didn’t. I told him it was dang’rous, but I
didn’t have no money to pay for his car. It
run good, too! Better’n a new one!”

Murfree waited. He counted out five one-
dollar bills.

“If he’s dead,” repeated Bud Gregory un-
comfortably, “it ain’t my fault! I told him it
was dang’rous but he wanted it, so ruther’n
try to pay a hundred an’ a quarter or have a
pack o’ lawin’, I done it. It took a time, too!”

Murfree handed over one one-dollar bill.

“That's sLx minutes’ talk,” he said. “Go
on.”

Bud Gregory leaned back. He spat ex-
pansively.

“Don’t mind this kind of work so much,”
he said appreciatively. “This fella come
drivin’ in just like you done. He’d skidded
off a wet clay patch an’ smashed his radiator
all to smithereens. He wanted me to fix it.
It was too tough a job.

“I told him I didn't aim to work myself to
death, but he kept pesterin’ me, so I says,
‘All right. I’ll fix ’er so she can run for ten
dollars.’ I thought that’d scare him off, but
he took me up. An’ I didn’t know how to fix
it, but I knew I could figger out a way.

“So I got to thinkin’, with him pacin’ up
an’ down waitin’ for me to set to work. An’ I
thought to myself, ‘Fixin’ that radiator is a
job of work! It’d be easier to figger out some
other way to keep her cool!’ An’ then it come
to me.”

“What?”

“All a radiator does,” drawled Bud Greg-
ory, “is let the heat get out of the coolin’
water. His radiator wasn’t no good. If I fixed
up some other way to take the heat out of the
coolin’ water, she’d run just as good an’ I
could bypass the radiator with a piece o’

THE GREGORY CIRCLE 61

hose. So I done it. Took me near an hour.”
“How’d you take the heat out of the wat-
er?” demanded Murfree.

“Shucks!” said Bud Gregory. “I got a
knack for that kind of thing. Y’know you can
heat a wire by passin’ a current through it.
I figured you can cool a wire by takin’ cur-
rent out of it.

“I fixed up a wire so the little hunks of
stuff that metal’s made of got all lined up.
Then the heat tries to knock ’em out of line,
an’ makes ’em pass on them — uh — them little
spinnin’ things that a electric current is.”

M URFREE felt a crawling sensation at
the back of his skull. This was un-
canny. Bud Gregory was speaking of the
polarization of atoms in a metal wire — which
cannot be done — so that the random move-
ments imparted by heat — which he could not
know anything at all about — would set up
strains which could only be relieved by an
exchange of electrons, which would in turn,
mean a current of electricity.

He had simply reversed the normal process
of turning current into heat, and had turned
heat into electricity to cool a motor. The
direct transformation of heat into electricity
has been a scientists’ dream for a hundred
years, one never accomplished.

But Bud Gregory had done it to save him-
self the trouble of repairing a shattered
radiator.

“So,” said Bud Gregory, “I stuck that wire
in a hose an’ bypassed the radiator. It’d
take out the heat an’ give current. I strung
some ordinary wire under the car to use
up the current. That’s all.

“The car run good. He went off, but a week
later he come back ragin’ that he couldn’t
sell his car. Nobody ’d buy it without a regu-
lar radiator workin’. How long I been talk-
in’?”

Murfee silently passed over another dollar
bill. Bud Gregory was decidedly something
that there is no word for. He knew intuitive-
ly the things that trained scientists have as
yet only partly found out. Just as some men
know by instinct where fish will be found
and what bait they will rise to, Bud Gregory
knew the behavior of atoms and electrons.

As freak mathematical marvels— -some of
them half-imbeciles otherwise — perform in-
finitely complex mathematics problems in
their heads with no clear idea of the process,
so Bud Gregory performed miracles in phys-
ics with no idea how he did it. He simply

knew the right answer when a problem was
presented.

Murfree felt an envy so acute that it was
almost hatred. But back in the hills there
was a thing that might make the world un-
inhabitable. And Bud Gregory had made it.
He fondled the dollar bill, folding it.

“He wanted me to fix his car right, he says,
an’ I got mad. I told him it was righter than
when it was made. An’ it was! Then he says
he’s goin’ to law me. But then he says, ‘Look
here! I was makin’ a trip lookin’ for some
minerals.

“ ‘I got a thing that helps me find ’em, but
part of it’s got lost. You fix me another an’
it’ll save me a long trip out an’ I’ll forget
about the car an’ pay you ten dollars extra.’ ”

He spat with an air of luxury.

“He had a dinkus like you got, only big-
ger. An’ he’d had a sheet o’ metal that was
supposed to block off them little hunks of
stuff that come down out of the sky. That’s
what’d got lost. He says if I can fix somethin’
to take its place he’ll call it square, but he’ll
law me otherwise.”

Murfree interpreted mentally. Someone
had been making a trip into the Smokies in
search of minerals. He had a Geiger counter.
He must have been working on a hunch that
uranium could be found. It was not im-
probable.

When Bud Gregory fixed his car in an ut-
terly improbable fashion — as he’d fixed Mur-
free’s — -this unknown other man had under-
stood, like Murfree. But he’d come back in
feigned rage and demanded the equivalent
of a cadmium shield, knowing that cadmium
was unavailable.

He’d realized what Bud Gregory was — a
near-illiterate with intuitive knowledge of
what subatomic particles could be made to
do, a knowledge as unreasoning and as un-
conscious as the feats of mathematical ge-
niuses. He’d demanded an impossibility be-
cause he knew Bud Gregory could achieve
it. And Bud Gregory had!

“He made me plenty mad,” said the lanky
man, resentfully. “He stood there sneerin’
at me, sayin’ if I was so smart as to fix his
car so it would run an’ he couldn’t sell it,
maybe I could fix somethin’ that he needed.
Either that or else.”

Murfree recognized something like genius
in the unknown man too. He’d taken the one
infallible course to make Bud Gregory work.
Threaten his leisure and sneer at his ability.
Of course the unknown got what he wanted!

THRILLING WONDER STORIES

“So?” said Murfree.

“I fixed him up!” said Bud Gregory in
amiable spite, “I fixed up a couple of radio
tubes — he had ’em — an’ made ’em so that
they made a kind of horn -shaped — uh —
block. Nothin’ could go through it. Nothin’!
No matter what size you fixed it, the horn
’ud be the same shape, an’ you could make
it any size.

“Nothin’ would get through the walls of
that horn. Not even them little hunks of
stuff you call — uh — neutrons. I set up the
dinkus an’ showed him.

“His clickin’ dinkus didn’t click any more.
It stopped them neutrons dead. An’ then I
says, ‘Just for extra, you can run a wire
around the place you camp an’ set this upside
down an’ not even bugs can get in to crawl
on you. But it’s dangerous! It’s dangerous!’ ”

He looked at Murfree, grinning.

“I figured it’d make him sick as a dog but
I’d warned ’im! It ain’t my fault if he stayed
in it an’ died!”

Murfree saw. He saw much more than Bud
Gregory could tell him. He envisioned a
quarter-mile circle of wire, built in a re-
mote mountain valley. It made a horn-shaped
— cone-shaped — barrier reaching down into
the earth. Nothing could pass through that
barrier, not even neutrons.

There is some slight radio-activity every-
where. Even rocks possess it. It is the cause
of the internal heat of the earth. Perhaps
the unknown man had come upon indications
of uranium ore underground in that valley,
perhaps not. But, surrounded by a shield
through which no neutron could escape, any
mass of material on earth would become an
atomic pile!

A SINGLE molecule of uranium in any
mass of rock will sooner or later dis-
integrate, giving off high-speed neutrons.
Normally they travel indefinitely and are
harmless. Some go up into the air and may
ionize a single molecule. Some may find a
fissionable atom and disrupt it.

But by far the greater number are simply
lost. Because they can escape. Within a bar-
rier from which they cannot escape, they
would bounce backward and forward until,
within even a limited mass of matter, they
did disrupt another atom. Neutrons from that
disrupted atom would then go on and on!

An ordinary atomic pile must be of a cer-
tain minimum size because it loses so many
neutrons from its outer surface that no chain-

reaction can maintain itself. As the size of
the pile increases the number that does not
escape increases faster than the number that
does. There is a size where enough strike
fissionable atoms before escaping to maintain
the reaction.

When as many are freed as escape the pile,
a chain reaction sustains itself. But when
none can escape, there is no minimum size.
There is no minimum purity of materials.
Prevent neutrons from escaping and any-
thing at all, of any size, becomes an atomic
pile.

Murfree passed over a third dollar bill.

“Now I’m paying you to listen to me,” he
said evenly. “That man used your outfit and
made a circular block for neutrons a quarter-
mile across with the horn pointed down.
Maybe a million, maybe five million tons
of rock were inside it. Maybe there was some
uranium in it too. None of the neutrons could
escape. Each one bounced back and forth
until it broke another atom. That made
more neutrons bounce back and forth and
break other atoms. You knew that would
happen. You knew even a little pile would
make him sick. But he made a monstrous
one! It didn't make him sick. It killed him.

“Perhaps he intended to run it a while and
then shut it off. It would have created
enough radioactive isotopes by its normal
working to make him a millionaire many
times over. But he didn’t turn it off in time!
Because it killed him! And so the pile kept
on working!

“Back in the mountains it’s working now.
There’s hot air rising from it and every
breath of it is deadly poison! It goes up high
and the winds spread it and presently it
comes down to the ground again and kills.
He didn’t turn it off!”

Bud Gregory gaped at him. It was clear
that he had never thought of such a thing.
So much more than a genius that there is no
word for it, he was like a child or a savage
in that he could not think ahead. But he
understood now. The unnameable intuition
which had carried him to the achievement of
a miracle had not told him the consequences
of the miracle. But as Murfree pointed them
out he saw.

“M-my gosh!” said Bud Gregory. He
looked enormously concerned.

“Nobody can live to get to it to turn it off,”
said Murfree, grimly. “Maybe a plane can
drop a bomb that will blast it. But it’ll be
weeks before I can make myself believed.

THE GREGORY CIRCLE 63

Meanwhile there’s poison being poured into
the air. People are dying right now.

“For five miles around that thing you made,
there’s not even a blade of grass alive. The
people in the cabins for ten miles around are
dying and don’t know why. And that horn-
shaped mass of ore and earth inside your
field is full of more flying neutrons than any
atom pile ever was.

“Suppose -we turn that shield off with a
bomb and all those free neutrons are turned
loose at once! How far away will they kill
every living thing? Fifty miles? A hundred
miles?”

Bud Gregory swallowed. He undoubtedly
understood more clearly than Murfree him-
self, now that it was pointed out to him.

“M-my gosh!” he said again. “I — uh — I
didn’t meant nothin’ like that!”

Murfree handed him a fourth dollar bill
with an indescribable sensation of irony.

“Now tell me how to turn it off without
killing everybody all the way to here!” he
commanded evenly. “If it kills me to do it
that’s all right. But if you don’t tell me how
to stop the thing I’m going to kill you, you
know. Here and now.”

He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t realize
that he was threatening. It simply seemed
necessary. If Bud Gregory could doom a
continent or a world and not be able to stop
what he had created, he was too dangerous
to be allowed to live.

But Bud Gregory spoke unhappily.

“I didn’t mean nothin’ like that! I just
meant to make that fella sick as a dog. I
figured he might make a little horn an’ sleep
in it when he camped. He’d be plenty sick
by mornin’. But the dumb fool — ” Then he
knitted his brows. “I’ll figure out something.
I gotta knack for that kinda thing.”

CHAPTER VI
. . . Who Wasn’t There

J UST three days later, Murfree was back
at the high hill-crest which was actually
a pass between mountains. A steady wind
blew from behind him. All about him the
world was dead. Nothing lived. Nothing!
He didn’t carry the counter, now. There was
no point in it.

He carried, instead, a clumsy contrivance
set up in a wooden box in which canned to-

matoes had once reached the village of Bran-
don.

Bud Gregory walked with him, anxiously
holding before him a loop of wire which he
said would stop the neutrons for his own
protection. Bud Gregory had actually sat
up at night to make the outfit for his own
protection and the mass of tangled wiring
Murfree carried.

They reached a spot where they could look
into the valley beyond. It was literally a val-
ley of death. There was nothing alive in it.
Not one blade of grass, not one shrub, not
one bird or insect, not even a bacterium.
Everything was dead.

And a swirling, humming column of heated
air rose skyward, snatching up deadly dust
from a quarter-mile patch of earth that was
quite red-hot, now. Every grain of that dust
was the most deadly stuff known to men.

Bud Gregory looked. He was pale. He
had come through miles of desolation. He
had seen the silent cabins of the mountain-
folk and the shriveled crops that they had
planted. He knew that he had made the thing
which had killed them. But now, looking
down at the carbonized half-cabin and the
heap of huddled garments in it which had
been a man, he muttered defensively.

“That fella played heck! I told him it was
dang’rous!”

He propped up his loop of wire so that it
still protected him. Murfree silently unloaded
himself. Bud Gregory made a final assembly.
There were a few — a very few — radio tubes.
Murfree had traced every lead in the com-
plicated wiring, and he could not even be-
gin to understand it.

By all modern knowledge of electronics, it
would do nothing whatever. The tubes would
light and current would flow and nothing
would happen — according to modern know-
ledge of such things. But Bud Gregory had
labored over it and risked his life to bring
it here.

He was untutored and almost illiterate,
while Murfree had spent years in the study
of just such science as this should represent.
So Murfree helped as a naked savage might
help to set up a radio-beam, in absolute ig-
norance of even its basic principles.

“Like I told you,” said Bud Gregory in a
troubled voice, “this new outfit is like that
there thing that makes that — uh — pile. Only
this don’t make a hollow horn. This here
is solid. It won’t only stop them — uh — neu-
trons from goin’ through a place. It’ll stop

THRILLING WONDER STORIES

’em dead in their tracks, right where they
are when it hits. It’s gonna make a lot of
heat.”

He set up what could only be a directional
antenna, weirdly distorted. Later, much
later, Murfree would draw the design from
memory and then marvel at the pattern it
would project. Now he was simply grim.
Bud Gregory checked his connections.

“All I’m worried about is the heat,” he
said uncomfortably. “I euess we better not
look.”

He adjusted the weirdly-shaped antenna.
He sighted by some instinctive method of
his own. Then he turned his head.

“Don’t look. It’s gonna get hot!”

He threw a clumsy, home-made switch.
And the earth rocked.

There were probably some millions of tons
of material acting as an atomic pile, filled
with all the monstrous energy of speeding
neutrons. Then, suddenly, those neutrons
stopped. Radioactivity stopped — dead. And
all the monstrous power of the reaction in
being, was converted into heat. It was not
atomic energy at all. It was neutronic ener-
gy, which is of a different and vastly lower
order. But that was enough!

The sheer expansion of stone, raised thous-
ands of degrees in the fraction of a second,
made the ground stagger. Murfree reeled
as the very hill shook beneath him. There
was a lurid flash of light. The dull-red glow-
ing surface of the quarter-mile circle became
instantly molten — white-hot — liquid! There
was a monstrous bellowing and rumbling
from the very bowels of the earth.

And then the round lake of melted earth
spouted upward. Gases underground strove
mightily to expand in the mass of melted
magma. Lava welled up and spread and en-
gulfed the tiny fence and the half-burned
cabin and the incredibly small apparatus
which had created the whole cancerous
■thing. Cabin and everything else disappeared
in the spreading white-hot flood.

Then bubbles reached the surface. Gigan-
tic masses of incandescent gas leaped up-
ward. The rock was literally effervescing,
boiling, bubbling in a horrible blinding froth
which spouted masses of liquid stone into the
sky.

URFREE stood his ground for seconds
Ivl only. Bud Gregory turned and ran
and Murfree ran with him. Ahead of them
a fiery mass of rock hurtled down and

splashed. Fire broke out. There were other
fires to right and left.

Just once, as he fled, Murfree turned his
eyes backward and saw a meteor-like mass
of melted stone fall upon and obliterate the
apparatus they had brought and used in the
pass. Murfree felt, an illogical sense of re-
lief even as he ran on desperately.

The noise died down in half an hour. After
all, huge as the thing had been, it was minute
by comparison with an actual volcano, how-
ever much more deadly. By the time they had
reached the car storm-clouds were gather-
ing over the blazing area.

Ten miles away — the car ran perfectly
from the first, in proof that there was no
longer a neutron-flood to ionize the air —
ten miles away they saw rain falling upon
smokilv flaming hillsides. Lightning flashed
among dark clouds. Water poured down. Not
even a forest fire could survive such a down-
pour.

They went back to Brandon. It took them
a day and night of steady driving, alternating
at the wheel. Bud Gregory had little to say
the whole way back. But when Murfree
stopped the car before the repair shed and
let him out Gregory grinned uncomfortably.

“What you goin’ to do now?” He added
apologetically: “I didn't mean to make noth-
in’ like that. He made me mad an’ then he
used that dinkus like it wasn’t meant to be
used.”

Murfree had deft his wife and daughter in
Brandon while he went back into the hills.
Now he spoke tiredly.

“I’ll pick up my family and go hack to
Washington. I’ll report as much as they’ll
believe. Anyhow, when that rock cools off
there’ll be more radioactive stuff in it than
is available in all the rest of the world to-
gether. Since your apparatus is cut off it
won’t act as a pile now, but it’s plenty radio-
active!”

Bud Gregory swallowed.

“I — uh — I lost time from work, goin’ along
with you,” he said uneasily. “Y’oughta pay
me day wages, anyhow. Huh? Say! You
kinda liked that thing I fixed your car with.
How’d you like to buy it?”

Murfree grimly got out his wallet. He
counted what he had left. It was his ex-
penses for getting back home.

“I’ve got just six hundred dollars,” he said.
“It’s worth more, but I’ll give you that for it.”

“She’s yours!” said Bud Gregory. All his
uneasiness vanished. His eyes glistened. He

THE GREGORY CIRCLE

brought out the round cheesebox and put it
in the back of Murfree’s car.

“Anyhow,” he said contentedly,” I can al-
ways make another one when I got a mind
to. So long.”

Murfree drove off and got his wife and
little girl. He left Bud Gregory looking spec-
ulatively at the eight automobiles awaiting
the moment when he felt like working. . . .

Back in Washington Murfree made his re-
port At first they told him he was crazy.
But seismographs did report a minor earth-
quake centered just where he’d said. A plane
flew over and brought back photographs
which proved the truth.

And then the Manhattan Project took over
and built a splendid concrete road to the
mass of highly if artificially radioactive
rock and extracted large quantities of practi-
cally every known radioactive isotope from
it Everybody was happy.

But they wanted badly to talk to Bud
Gregory — and they couldn’t.

When FBI men went to urge him impera-
tively to came to Washington, he had dis-

appeared. He had bought one of the eight
cars in his repair shop for twenty-five dollars,
repaired it by some magic of his own and
gone off with his wife and children.

He was undoubtedly a motor-tramp, roam-
ing the highways contentedly or sitting in
magnificent somnolence, waiting until he felt
like working or moving on. Incredible riches
awaited him if he was ever found and con-
sented to work.

Neither event seemed likely.

But Murfree was in the oddest situation of
all. He couldn’t be officially praised for what
he did on leave. Nor could he be required to
give up the gadget he bought from Bud
Gregory. And that gadget was useless. It
worked, but nobody understood it, and every
attempt to duplicate it had failed. Duplicates
simply didn’t do anything. Murfee is still
studying it.

But he did gain something, after all. His
wife and small daughter are likely to keep
on living and he was promoted a grade in the
Civil Service. Now he gets forty-seven hun-
dred a year.

When panic and widespread destruction threaten our cities, the Wizard
of the Great Smokies invents a new gadget to protect America
from atomic rockets — and uses it in an astounding
and entertaining fashion — in

THE NAMELESS SOMETHING

Another Complete Bud Gregory Novelet Packed
With Humor and Surprises

By WILLIAM FITZGERALD

Coming in Our Next Issue!

VICTORIOUS FAILURE

By BRYCE WALTON

Professor Klauson stood on the threshold of immortality,
only to be driven back by strange, unfathomable forces!

W ITH good reason, Professor H.

Klauson hesitated; his wife’s arms
were holding him with a strange-
ly insistent urgency and fear. He tried to dis-
engage himself, but not with much enthusi-
asm. Although he had not admitted it to
anyone but the Presidium’s psycho-medic
staff, he was afraid, too. Desperately and
helplessly afraid.

"Howard, please.” Her pale blue eyes were
wide, staring into his with that intimacy only

someone loved completely and without com-
promise ever sees. "Don’t go back to the
Laboratories, Howard. Don’t ever go back
again.”

He smiled, unsuccessfully. He had never
been able to hide anything from Lin.

“But, dear, this is ridiculous. We’re scien-
tists! We’re not frightened by vague, in-
tangible fears.”

Her hands tightened on his shoulders.
“We’re scientists; so let us admit the obvious.

"VICTORIOUS FAILURE 67

Something doesn’t want you to ever com-
plete your research, Howard. We’ve worked
together for ten years, and now you’re right
on the verge of discovering the secret of life
itself. And it means more to humanity than
anything else in the history of mankind. But
I’m afraid, Howard, and so are you. What-
ever is against us stopped you before. Your
mind almost broke. It will try again, and
this time your mind may not recover.”

He managed to push her from him, and im-
mediately he felt lonelier, isolated. His faint
laugh sounded foolishly insincere.

“Lin, for the love of science! You sound
like a mystic. Any mind is liable to become
unintegrated. You talk about invisible, in-
tangible forces. These things can only be
in men’s minds, dear. No mentality is im-
mune to disorientation.”

She sobbed, her head swung back and forth
hopelessly. A cloud of lovely hair glinted
liquidly in the shifting light from the har-
monics glowing from the transparent walls
of their apartment. He couldn’t leave her in
this state.

“Lin, darling, listen to me. I can’t abandon
my life’s work. Particularly something so
profoundly important to humanity. One more
projection, and my ‘closed system’ principle
will be concluded. After that, think of it,
Lin! This is really the one thing mankind
has been seeking. All his other activities are
only bypaths. With eternal life possible, man-
kind will have a real reason for struggling
onward. Lin — ”

“No, Howard,” she was saying, brokenly.
“There isn’t an argument. To me, your mind
is more important. Why did your mind black
out just before you could finish your last
experiment? Why. the whole magnificent
psycho-medical staff at the Presidium
couldn’t find a reason. All the charts show
you to be amazingly normal. There is some-
thing bigger than our science. Howard. It
doesn’t intend for you to ever finish your
research.”

“A woman’s intuition?” he said sardonical-
ly-

“Not a woman’s,” she corrected. “Ours.
Because you feel it the same as I do.”

SICK, vague fear came over him as he
stood there nervously, remembering
the gleaming, arched height of the biochem-
istry wards at World Science Presidium.
That singularly awful instant just before he
could finish his last experiment, when all his

mental faculties had crumbled. The micro-
film protector had just commenced whirring.
Then that final spiraling downward into des-
perate gray fear and unconsciousness.

There had to be a logical explanation so
that whatever blockage stood between him
and the conclusion of his research could be
torn down. The secret of the single cell had
long been his. Whatever that three-dim mi-
crophoto film revealed, he and only he could
turn the key to open the ultimate secret
door into victorious eternity for all man-
kind. Now he blinked burning eyes. Lin was,
of course, right. He felt it. too. A hidden,
omnipresent kind of force that would pre-
vent him from completing his research. But
such a thought was adult infantilism, at best.
A hidden force! In his world there had to be
logical sequence of cause and effect. But
even the psycho-medic staff hadn’t been able
to find one.

“Howard,” she was saying, lips quivering.
“Remember our Moon House?”

Klauson bristled, froze. “I remember. The
World gave us a magnificent marble house
on the Moon overlooking Schroeter’s Canyon
— a return favor for my many gifts to man-
kind. What a juvenile farce. Imagine me
sitting up there on the Moon, with you — two
futile little escapists, haunted by our own
uselessness, and our fears. No, Lin. I’ve my
particular destiny to fulfill. It isn’t hiding
away on the Moon. I’ll never accept retire-
ment on the Moon, or any place else. Ether
now, or after my research on the life force.
I’d rather die than stop working in science.”

He started for the exit panel. Her voice
cut deeply, slowed him, turned him.

“You’re going to the Laboratories again
then,” she asked faintly, “in spite of what
happened before?”

He nodded, but when he tried to say yes,
his throat was dry and sticky.

“Good-by, Howard,” she said.

She was crying when he left. It made him
feel terribly lost and guilty to leave her cry-
ing. But he had to. What made it so bad
was that Lin had never cried before; she was
so strong, emotionally. Without any real
cause, this made him more nervous and ir-
ritable. But he was one of the world’s great-
est scientists. Everything must have a cause,
somewhere. Sometime.

His gyroear dropped down on the spacious
roof-landing of the Biochemistry Building
at the World Science Presidium. It was be-
ginning to rain — solid, heavy, sharp-driving

THRILLING WONDER STORIES

drops that spattered on the dull, plastic mesh
as he walked hurriedly across it to the ifr-
gress.

“Hello, Professor Klauson. This is a sur-
prise. I didn’t know you would be coming
back so soon.”

Klauson started violently, clutched at his
heart. A sudden, shooting pain was there.
Yet the staff had found nothing wrong with
his mental or physical integration. They
had checked and rechecked.

“Oh — it’s you — Larry!” He paused, re-
lieved. “You — you startled me, Larry. I
didn’t see anyone on the landing.”

“I just came over to do a little work on
my own,” Larry explained.

He was a young, enthusiastic, highly
capable student biochemist, with a shock of
unruly black hair. He had graduated from
World Tech seven years ago, and had been
Klauson’s assistant for five, working with
him faithfully, sometimes during those gruel-
ing sixty-four hour stretches. He had been
the only one with Klauson when he had lost
consciousness.

“Didn’t expect you back so soon, Profes-
sor,” said Larry, talking casually as their
elevator dropped them down below the sub-
floor level into the spacious, almost vaulted
silence of Klauson’s private laboratories.
“Say, Professor, you intend to try to finish
up again tonight?”

Klauson stiffened. He was here, he felt
capable enough. It was only a matter of a
few hours. Why not? Even as a therapeutic
measure.

“I believe I will, Larry. I wasn’t intending
to, but now that you’re here, too, I might as
well.”

Larry said nothing. He stood in the soft,
yet full brilliance of the invisible flueros,
his black, almost blue hair hanging over his
eyes. He smiled. Klauson started, he had
never quite responded this way to Larry’s
expression before. It seemed — peculiar, rath-
er strange. He discarded that chain of
thought and looked about his laboratory.

OTHING had changed. Not that Klauson
had expected things to be different.
The microphoto film cabinets stood tier upon
tier, a long stretch of recorded effort, a com-
plete step-by-step, intricate process of cre-
ating life from that awesome moment when
he had known the successful preparation of
the first simple colloid and had started on

AMtanib .eunlnacie

Through the actual combination of the first
molecules and the organic colloid and then
the first tiny speck of synthesized protoplasm.
The frenzied day and night battle against
time. Time, that was the predominant factor
in nature that did tile trick. But he had com-
pressed millions of years into twenty-five.
From simple, organic compound through the
simple colloid, the protein, the primitive pro-
toplasm, the simplest unicellular organism,
the flagellate and — then the great jump into
the structure of the gene, the ferreting-out
of that intricate, vital combination that gave
man life and maintained it. He had con-
quered — almost.

The high, arched ceiling in the lab with
its glowing columns and its streamlined
equipment had been provided him by the en-
tire earth — provided him by man’s coopera-
tive faith in himself. Men who would find
k> much greater an impetus to fight ahead
if they only knew that whatever other suc-
cess they might have, their ultimate end was
inevitably life, instead of death.

But he would affirm a greater investment
of their faith than their wildest dreams had
ever granted him. No other man, or com-
bination of men, in the world could syn-
thesize all the knowledge in those cabinets
and emerge with the final answer that he
alone could evolve. No one but himself.
Larry Verrill might possibly develop some
capacity to work on the chain. But unlikely.
High specialization had made it Klauson’s
responsibility alone.

Enthusiasm, eagerness was returning; the
fear was gone.

“It’s so simple, really, now that it’s prac-
tically over,” he said as he unzipped his
aerogel cloak, and stepped toward the micro-
photo film projector. He was talking mostly
to himself, a habit of his, only partly to Ver-
rill.

“Yes,” said Larry softly. “I suppose you
might call it simple.”

“Carrel saw to it that cells with which he
experimented had a chance to achieve im-
mortality. Under controlled conditions, the
growth proceeds forever, logically. The body,
a collection of cells, is a ‘closed system.’ Like
a gyrocar, that’s what we called it, didn’t
we, Larry? No closed system can endure
unless it can inspect itself, oil itself, and
keep itself in repair. A gyrocar can’t do that,
but the body can and does, though imper-
fectly.”

Klauson warmed to his subject, and his

VICTORIOUS FAILURE §S

voice assumed a fresh vigor.

“We’ve conquered that imperfection! Yet
I can hardly believe it myself. People can
go on living without that final terrible, un-
conscious fear of death that must defeat
them. One more projection, Larry. One re-
maining link for correlation. The answer is
right here in this projector. An actual three-
dimensional record of the very first spark
in the heart of the cell itself, the primary
bursting of a carbon atom commingling with
a single cell, creating life. It’s the first and
the final record, Larry.”

Larry nodded, but his lips were twisted in
a rather sad, cynical smile, it seemed to
Klauson.

“So simple, isn’t it, Professor?”

“Yes, it really is,” asserted Klauson, his
enthusiasm blinding him to the peculiar re-
action of Larry Verrill. “Whatever is re-
vealed in this three-dim projection will con-
tain the final step for the infinite prolonga-
tion of human life. When I synthesize it with
Compton’s H-9 film, we’ll have it. Incredible,
isn’t it?”

“You may not realize just how incredible.
How could you?” said Verrill. “Nor I either,
for that matter.”

Klauson hesitated, his hand frozen above
the button that would throw the projector
into life. Then, shrugging, his hand started
to move down. But it didn’t.

For then, unbelievably, terrifyingly, it hap-
pened a second time. Professor H. Klauson
felt a blackness encompassing the mighty,
vaulted laboratory. It closed in tightly,
smothering, icy. It wrapped his entire swirl-
ing mind in darkness. . . .

A little round man smiled broadly at him
from a stool close to his bed in the psycho-
ward.

"Remember me. Professor?” His face
beamed with self-possession.

“You’re the clinic psychologist who han-
dled the other electroencephal checkup,”
said Klauson quickly. “Or are you?”

“Good recall.” commented the psychol-
ogist. “Name’s Dunnel. I’ve rechecked your
whole file since your — ah — second disorienta-
tion. Weak alphas of course; but that’s nec-
essary in your type. No disrhythmia. Tempo’s
exceptionally well balanced. Look, Profes-
sor Klauson, there is still no logical reason
for your being here. But meanwhile, these
charts don’t fib. But I’m not so smug as to
think we know so much about the old cortex.
Still, logically, we can’t find a reason.”

“But there must be a — ”

“Oh, well find out, Professor. How do you
feel now? The harmonics working all right?”
"Not quite. Dunnel, both times I have
been, well, terribly afraid before the at-
tacks. Some kind of intuition. My wife
noticed it, too.”

“You’re beginning to build delusions and
rationalizations. We must guard against that.
You’re bound to put undue emphasis on it,
make it far more complex and important than
it really is, because it happened at such criti-
cal moments. You deal in absolutes, Profes-
sor. Cause must equal effect.”

“But it wasn’t coincidence either time,”
insisted Klauson. “Not logically. Coincidence
is too simple, too handy a gadget, Dunnel.
Isn’t it?”

“Maybe,” said Dunnel, lighting a cigarette.
“Anyway, I won’t burden you with a lot of
hasty probing around. The Staff says you’re
O.K. to leave the clinic today. Come to my of-
fice tomorrow afternoon if you feel like it.
If you don’t, call me up and tell me why.
See you tomorrow.”

A little later after the Staff had given him
another thorough going-over which revealed
nothing amiss, he met his wife who was wait-
ing for him with their gyrocar on the roof-
landing.

NLY a third of Klauson’s normal life
was gone, yet he looked twice his age
except for rare moments like this. He kissed
Lin almost boyishly as they stood together
looking over the gleaming plastic structures
piercing a clear, blue sky. A soft warm sum-
mer wind blew disarmingly over Washington.

Finally Klauson said abruptly: “I’m sorry,
Lin. You were right. I’ll admit the obvious.
Something beyond the scope of our science
is blocking my progress. But what is it?”
She shook her head, her eyes brooding
with concern for him, deep, dark.

“I’ve talked with the Science Council,” she
finally said in a whisper. She turned with
resolution to face him. “Howard, they have
agreed with me. You need a very long vaca-
tion. Our Moon House is gathering Lunar
dust, if there is any. I have the Council’s
support now. We’re going to the Moon and
we’re not going to think about anything that
even suggests biochemistry.”

“There isn’t any such a thing, not on this
world,” said Klauson.

“Howard. We’re going to raise extra-ter-
restrial flowers.”

70 THRILLING WONDER STORIES

Klauson stared, and was suddenly and vio-
lently angry.

“Flowers! You’re mad!”

“But the Council’s on my side, Howard.
They’re going to” — she paused, lips trem-
bling — “going to accept your resignation
from the Presidium.”

A sick hate flooded his stomach, burst in
his brain. He was stunned, impotent. He
quivered silently. It was their own staff that
had said there was nothing wrong with him!
Yet, they were demanding that he resign!
Rest on that escapist’s bromide, Luna. Re-
treat from reality; rot in meaningless isola-
tion.

“I’ll not do it, Lin,” he announced harshly.
“I refuse to drop a conclusion that might
mean the final step in human evolution.”

He was dazed, ill, as she led him silently
into the gyrocar and piloted it to their apart-
ment. No use arguing with Lin about it. She
had that ageless woman’s selfish love to pro-
tect her own kind. She and the Council had
combined to work against him, instead of
helping him solve the cursed enigma.

As soon as they reached home, Klauson
contacted the Council President, Gaudet, on
the teleaudio. He argued the case, objected
fiercely, begged. Gaudet was kind, logical.

“We’re all so sorry, Klauson,” his huge
head said. “But it is quite obvious that you
absolutely need a lengthy period of relaxa-
tion. Although our own staff can find no log-
ical basis for this decision, we undoubtedly
shall, and soon.

“You worked almost steadily for ten years.
It is very possible that some highly special-
ized cellular blockage has developed that
even our probers have failed to detect. A
few years, raising flowers as Mrs. Klauson
has suggested, something completely dissoci-
ated from your present work, is probably
the answer. Then you can return to your
laboratories. Meanwhile, your assistant,
Larry Verrill, can continue with your re-
search, perhaps?”

“Verrill is an excellent assistant,” Klauson
said, controlling himself with difficulty. “But
he can never finish my work. I operate, many
times, empirically; you know that. My brain
alone holds the key to correlate most of the
basic links of the chain.”

But no amount of discussion could per-
suade Gaudet. It had all been definitely de-
cided by the Council and Lin. He would re-
tire to the Moon House by Schroeter’s Can-
yon and raise fantastic flowers in the Moon’s

unique environmental conditions. He would
vegetate and rot with the flowers!

“Raising flowers!” Klauson sagged, groaned
helplessly, desperately.

The next afternoon in Dunnel’s office with
its psycho-harmonics shifting benevolently
from the opaque walls, Dunn el was saying:
“Fear of failure, that’s one possibility; un-
likely though. Doesn’t check with your
psycho-charts.”

“There is no doubt,” Klauson said. “I’m
just as certain about this conclusive step as
I’ve been about every one I’ve taken since
I began.”

“But you don’t know,” Dunnel pointed
out, “until you’ve concluded and some illu-
sive censor prevents that. Wait! Here’s an-
other possibility: maybe you’re afraid of the
consequences of giving humanity the ability
to live forever! Think of what it would mean.
Think of it consciously! I can’t. It’s too big.
Every basic pattern completely altered.
Psychology and the social sciences, particu-
larly, would no longer apply. Humanity
would become something unhuman by all
present standards of evaluation. It’s really
an alien concept, Professor. Subconsciously,
you’re afraid of what it would mean!”

“I see your reasoning there, Dunnel.
Frankly, I’ve never considered that at all.
I’ve been so wrapped up in the thing itself.”

“But let’s assume that your subconscious
has been working on it,” insisted Dunnel. “I
tell you, Professor; you go back to that lab-
oratory of yours, right now. Get in there
with all the fatal paraphernalia and just in-
trospect for a while. Think of the whole, and
go beyond the limits of your specialized
course. There are so many possible conse-
quences to a sudden transition from mortality
to immortality. Think about the things that
can, and will, happen. Seems to me, that
might well be the motivation for the fear.
And, Professor, come back and see me to-
morrow.”

K LAUSON was like the pilots who get
rocket psychosis on their first Luna
run, and who must immediately make an-
other flight or lose their resistance to space-
fear forever. He must go back to the labora-
tory. Try again.

And Dunnel’s diagnosis about Klauson’s
possible fear of the consequences of giving
humanity sudden immortality — he definitely
had something there. Klauson wondered why
he had never thought of it before. Like Dun-

VICTORIOUS FAILURE 71

nel had said, it would change every present
standard of humanity. The enormity of the
possible repercussion!

Klauson trembled a little with triumph.
Yes, that could be the basis for the fear. A
scientist must weigh the consequences of his
discoveries. Would the secret of eternal life
be a boon, or a catastrophe for man?

Klauson entered a public teleaudio booth
and got Verrill’s apartment in east Washing-
ton. Verrill’s eyes seemed to have changed
— they looked like those of someone else.
Ridiculous. Yes, he did need a rest.

“Verrill,” he said tightly, “I’m going back
to the laboratory again, right now. I want
you there, too.”

Verrill’s eyes widened, then narrowed. His
mouth slipped into that sad, cynical grin.

“If you insist, Professor. And you always
would, of course.”

"Why — er — naturally, I will.” said Klauson.
“Meet me there in fifteen minutes.”

The teleaudio faded, but Klauson sat there
a moment. He brushed at his face wearily.
So strange, the way Verrill had talked — like
a stranger almost. But fifteen minutes later
the vaulted height of the gleaming labora-
tory was very silent, and seemed, somehow,
cold, as Klauson saw Verrill walking toward
him. Verrill seemed to blot out the labora-
tory, loom extraordinarily large before him.

Klauson had unconsciously been backing
away. He felt the hard cold light of the sup-
porting column against the small of his back.
He was looking, fearfully, into Larry Ver-
niks eyes.

Into his eyes! Into incredible, swirling
blackness. Into space and time and — -
eternity.

And Professor H. Klauson — knew.

“Varro.” said the thin, wavering body. “It
is time for your little transmigration. The
Switcher is ready. Don’t think too much
about what you must do. We are four-dimen-
sional but we are still not very well adapted
to the complications of the coordinate
stream.”

Klauson knew, yet it was far beyond his
capacity to understand. He was seeing some-
thing that had happened, yet was still to hap-
pen. Fourth dimensionally, time, as he knew
it, was meaningless. The man who had spok-
en in this strange world revealed by Verrill’s
alien brain, was named Grosko. The other
figure, Varro, was also Verrill. Klauson knew
that, but he understood very little.

Grosko’s boneless fmgetfe were manipulat-

ing the matrix coordinate console.

“I’ve never been convinced,” muttered
Varro. “It is an incomprehensible cycle, even
to our fourth-dimensional minds. Where can
there ever be any logical end?”

“You have already taken on some of your
three-dimensional characteristics — those of
Verrill, whose body you will assume control
of, and merge your mentality with. Already
you are beginning to think in terms of ab-
solutes, in terms of three-dimensional logic.
Forget a hypothetical end, which our fourth-
dimensional consciousness knows cannot
exist. You will encounter no difficulties.
You will gradually adjust yourself to their
concepts of the absolute; but still you will
retain enough of your Varro mentality to
carry out your assignment.”

“But it seems so unprogressive in the Uni-
versal sense,” persisted Varro. “Everything
seems only a big, futile circle.”

“But not for us; that is your three-dimen-
sional absolutism creeping in already though
you have not even begun merging with Ver-
rill yet. You are beginning to make pre-
mature psychological adjustments. There are
countless tangents of probability. And in the
particular one that has evolved us, Professor
Klauson must be prevented from completing
his research. If he does, we will not evolve.
But of course we have evolved, so it is in-
evitable that you will carry out your assign-
ment successfully. Inevitable.”

“No free agency, even in the eternal
sense.” mused Varro. “Everything in all <B»»
mensions of space-time is interdependent
We are aware of it, because of our fourth-
dimensional minds, but those of Klauson%!
stage of development are not.”

“That is correct,” said Grosko. “They real-
ize that everything that has happened is de-
termined by a complex array of circum-
stantial causes, but they see this only im
immediate, comprehensible perspective. Tils',
same is true in the Universal also, and in the!
time-anlim, which their three-dimensional!
consciousness cannot comprehend.

“Cause and effect, fourth -dimensionally,,
works also in what they would consider, re-
versal. What they see as an effect, is also
cause. They tie in past, future, present, with
cause and effect. Really there is no associa-
tion. An effect can be in what they consider
their past; and a cause can exist in their fu-
ture. But you will understand after you as-
sume possession of Verrill’s consciousness.”
*1 hope so. It certainty seems terribly in-

72 THRILLING WONDER STORIES

volved to me right now.”

“That is a natural reaction of VerrilTs
mind which you are already beginning to
associate yourself with. Well, Varro, you are
ready for the complete alteration?”

“Naturally,” said Varro. “It is on the
chronosophic charts, isn’t it?”

“Good-by, then,” said Grosko. “Don’t use
the Power unless you find it absolutely nec-
essary, then only mildly of course — ”

Varro was enveloped in the radiations of
the matrix. His consciousness molecules
leaked slowly into the unsuspecting and nar-
row confines of Larry Verrill’s three-dimen-
sional consciousness as he graduated from
World Tech in 2081, two years before he was
to become the laboratory assistant of Profes-
sor H. Klauson.

“You — you’re Varro?” Klauson managed
in a hoarse whisper.

Larry Verrill nodded. A curtain had
dropped over Verrill’s eyes behind which
those incredible, incomprehensible vistas had
opened for a brief interim.

K LAUSON staggered. There was no
basic comprehension. No two-dimen-
sional being could imagine such a thing as
UP. What he termed past, present, future, to
a fourth-dimensional concept would be re-
garded in the same way as if he, Klauson,
were floating a mile in the air regarding the
activities of a two-dimensional plane-man.
Their only temporal sense would involve
simply horizontal movement. And his three-
dimensional concepts couldn’t ever conceive
of those of Varro’s. For Varro, there was
no past, present, future, as Klauson saw
them.

Varro and Grosko and their world was
really a future stage of man to Klauson. But
Klauson and his world of 2089 was not really
the past to Varro. It was only a part of the
time-anlim, a term which was meaningless to
Klauson. It referred to the oneness of space-
time which was clearly envisioned in their
fourth- dimensional minds.

“You’re not — human,” Klauson finally
managed to say.

It sounded strange, and somewhat absurd
to him after he said it.

“No,” agreed Verrill or Varro. “And I
might say to you, ‘you’re not an ape.’ You
think of past and future as somehow, sep-
arate. I can only tell you that it is all a kind
of oneness, which we call the time-anlim.
You realize now that my being here is in-

evitable, It isn’t a matter of probability. It
was never intended that you should finish
this experiment, so that the present stage of
humanity might live forever, forever, itself,
as a word, being meaningless abstraction.”
“But how can someone from the future
come back through time to influence the
present so that they will — ”

Verrill interrupted impatiently.

“That has already been partially explained.
Your three-dimensional brain can never un-
derstand it fully. Sufficient to say, Profes-
sor Klauson, that immortality, by its very
nature, is impossible.”

Klauson sagged despondently, futilely. He
was sitting on a stool looking up. There was
no impulse to escape, or to attempt to avoid
what was too obviously his end.

“Why?” he asked, listlessly. “Why is im-
mortality impossible?”

“Put it this way, Professor.” Klauson
winced; the voice sounded so like the harm-
less, youthful and rather naive Larry Verrill.
“Immortality means the cessation of man’s
association with the process of entropy. Your
developing makes another integral part of
the entropic process possible. You call it
evolution.”

He paused, then continued. “You regard
us as human. You have other labels, mutants,
homo-superiors, or even supermen. But we
only develop in this process called by you,
evolution. Can’t you see the paradox of im-
mortality? It would be feasible if immortality
was some part of the evolving process, but
it isn’t. It might be in some other line of
probability, but not this particular one. Look
into what you call the past, Professor.”
Verrill’s eyes were narrow, inscrutable.

“If the ape had suddenly developed im-
mortality, you wouldn’t have evolved. Think-
ing man could never have evolved from an
immortal and therefore stagnant race of apes.
Just as mortal man came from apes, so homo-
superior evolves from mortal man. Paradoxi-
cally, there can be no immortality, if the
true racial chain is to survive.”

Klauson sat stiffly. Well, Dunnel had got-
ten close to the correct solution though he
could never dream of the truth. There had
been a deeply buried subconscious fear of the
results of immortality. It would have de-
stroyed the — well, what he called ‘man’s fu-
ture.’ But there was one thing that might
be explained.

“Why have you allowed me to advance as
far as I have in my research?”

VICTORIOUS FAILURE **'

Verrill smiled sadly. “Your whole concept
is based on false logic,” he said. “But I
can’t explain. There isn’t a question of
allowing you. You see, you had to de-
velop this far with your experimentation.
Your work involving cosmic ray treatment
of genes resulted in certain germ plasm al-
teration in certain individuals. This will bring
about our fourth -dimensional emergence in
what you call ‘later,’ as mutants.”

“Then,” said Klauson faintly, “I’m also re-
sponsible for you.”

The young man nodded. “You would term
it that. But it’s all an integral whole. You
deal in cause and effect. But the closest you
can get to our logic is to hvphenate it end-
1 e s s 1 y, cause-effect-cause-effect-cause-ef-
fect-c a u s e-effect-cause-eSect-cause-effect,
without end.”

There was a heavy silence. Then Verrill
said, not unkindly, “I had better take care
of you now, Professor. Your mind will have
to bear far too much strain. Your reason-
ing processes will demand an explanation,
which for your three-dim consciousness, is
impossible. You will develop a psychosis un-
less I alter your mind sufficiently.”

"What are you going to do?” whispered
Klauson, his mouth dry.

“By suggestion, I’ll alter your basic be-
havior and motivation patterns. You will re-
tain most of your present mental character-
istics. Amnesia followed by new and funda-
mentally different lines of activity.”

Klauson started to run away, but he found
himself sucked into a whirling maelstrom of

senseless, unrelated chaos. He reeled dizzily.
He felt himself falling. . . .

H E SAW his laboratory assistant, Larry
Verrill, standing above him, saying
with nervous concern, “Professor, you’ve
fainted again. You all right now?”

Klauson felt a queer shocking sensation,
an intangible impulse, rather painful.

“No, Larry,” he replied. “It’s over with
me now. I really don’t think I could have
succeeded in achieving immortality for man-
kind anyway. There’s a flaw in the chain of
development, somewhere. And the whole
procedure is so complex we could never go
over it and find the error. Goodnight, Larry.
I’m going home.”

He didn’t wait for his gyrocar to reach his
apartment to tell Lin the startling develop-
ments. He contacted her by teleaudio.

“I’ve changed my mind, Lin dear. I’ve de-
cided to accept your and the Council’s ad-
vice. Get together everything we’ll want to
take to Moon House with us. And, by the
way, get all the microfilm you can find cm
botany and extraterrestrial horticulture. I
wonder what has been the matter with me
all my life?”

Her face shone with a lovely pink flush of
happiness as it faded from the small screen.

Klauson relaxed as the gyrocar sped to-
ward his apartment. His eyes closed, his
day-dream was one of glorious technicolor,
overflowing with mental reproductions of the
magnificent flowers he and Lin would grow
in the quiet comfort of the Lunarian valleys.

"You're the Only One in the World Who Can Explain My
Luck to Me and Show Me How to Use It
— and You Better Do it!"

S TEVE SIMS, former professor of physics, looked in amazement at
Lucky Connors, who had just conked him on the head a few minutes
before — and was now making this strange demand of him. With the two
men was the girl named Frances. It was a miracle that any of them were
alive.

The terrain around them was utterly dead and completely uninhabitable, destroyed a long
time ago by atomic explosives. Only homeless wanderers were alive. In the midst of this
devastation, it was odd to be questioned about the laws of probability. Steve Sims had been
working on an analysis of the principles of chance. Lucky Connors was phenomenally lucky,
could make anything turn out as he wanted it to — and Lucky Connors wanted to know why!

Follow the exploits of Steve Sims, Lucky Connors and the girl named Frances in THE
LAWS OF CHANCE, Murray Leinster's amazing novel of the atomic age in the March
issue of our companion magazine STARTLING STORIES! Now on sale — 15c everywhere!

QUEST TO CENTAURUS

By GEORGE O. SMITH

Given the joke assignment of tracking down a Kilroy of
the post-interplanetary-v/ar era. Captain Alfred Weston
discovers the fate of the solar system is in his hands!

CHAPTER I
Soft Assignment

C APTAIN ALFRED WESTON entered
the room and nodded curtly to the
men at the conference table. Doctor
Edwards, holding forth at the head of the
table, nodded as though he had not seen the
over-polite greeting. He waved the new-
comer to an empty seat on the opposite side
of the table, and Weston went around to sit
down.

Edwards had been talking on some other
subject, obviously, but now he dropped it.
“Captain Weston,” he said, “you are still
classified as convalescent.”

“Rank foolishness,” grumbled Weston.

“Unfortunately,” smiled Edwards, “it is
the Medical Corps that makes the decision. A
bit of rest does no man any harm. But, Wes-
ton, despite the convalescent classification,
we have a job that seems to be right up your
alley. Want it?”

“You’re asking?” said Weston quizzically.
“This is no order?”

A NOVELET OF THE SPACEWAYS

__ ' “ " 5 ‘ "

76 THRILLING WONDER STORIES

“As an official convalescent, we cannot
order you to duty.”

Weston scowled. “I see no choice,” he said.
His tone was surly, his whole attitude in-
imical.

“Nevertheless, the choice is your own,”
said Edwards. As psychiatrist for the Medi-
cal Corps, Edwards was treading on thin
ground. But he knew he must force this
disagreement into the open and blast it out
of Weston’s mind.

It was a common enough block, but it need-
ed elimination.

“Certainly the choice is mine,” said Wes-
ton bitterly. “Hobson’s Choice. Either I take
the job and do it, or I refuse to take it and
gain the disrespect of the entire Corps. I
see no choice and therefore I will take your
job — sight unseen!”

“We shall offer the job,” said Edwards
flatly. “After which you will make your
decision.”

“Very well,” answered Weston sullenly.

Edwards ignored the tone of the answer.
“Weston, you are a ranking officer. This job
requires a ranking officer because it de-
mands someone whose authority to investi-
gate will not be questioned, scoffed at or
ignored. You are now a Captain. We intend
to raise your rank to Senior Captain — which
is due you and has been withheld only until
your convalescence is complete.

“We shall offer you a roving order and a
four-mark commissioned directive which
will give you authority to requisition what-
ever items you may need to complete your
project. Experimental Spacecraft Number
XXII will be assigned to you.”

“You make it very attractive. Shall I now
quote the ancient one about ‘Beware of
Greeks bearing gifts’?”

“There is no need for insolence, Weston.
You are in excellent position to do us a
service. If you accept it will not be necessary
to create a hole in the Corps by removing
some other ranking officer from his com-
mand. This job will also give you the swing
of space once again. You’ve been out of
space now for about a year — ”

“Ever since the First Directive attack,”
said Weston bitterly.

“Right. But look, Weston. Regardless of
what opinion the world may have, we in
this room have reason to believe that there
is something hidden behind the Jordan
Green legend. We want you to get to the
bottom of it. Will you do this?”

W ESTON grunted. He looked across
the room to the door beside the
blank wall beside the doorframe. On the
space above the chair-rail were the scrawled
words Jordan Green was here!

They were written in space-chart chalk,
which Weston understood to be the case
with the uncounted thousands of such
scrawlings sprinkled all over the Solar Sys-
tem. It looked like a hurried scrawl at
first glance, yet it could not have been
written by a man in a tearing hurry be-
cause it was so very legible.

Weston himself had seen over a thousand
of such scrawls in out-of-the-way places
and he had joined in the hours of discus-
sion that went on through the Space Corps
as to who Jordan Green might be, and if
there were really such a character.

Jordan Green, it seemed, was one of those
legendary people that are never seen. He
had been everywhere and had apparently
been there first. It was a common joke
that, if the Space Corps started to erect a
lonely outpost on some secret asteroid on
Monday, Tuesday morning would find Jor-
dan Green’s familiar scrawl beside the door
on the unfinished wall.

The trouble was that Weston himself had
written one or two of these messages. And
though he suspected that every officer in the
Corps had been guilty of perpetuating the
gag at some time or other, not one of them
ever admitted it. It was a sort of unmen-
tioned, no-prize contest in the Corps just
something to talk about in the long lonely
times between missions.

Every officer clamored for missions to the
out of the way places because he hoped to
have a Jordan Green yarn to spin and the
legendary traveller was always reported.
Weston smiled at one incident he had heard
of.

An officer he knew had found a place
where there was no scrawl and had written,
I beat Jordan Green to this spot! The fol-
lowing day there was written beneath it, So
what? Have you looked under the wall-
paper? Jordan Green. The officer had torn
away the wallpaper and, below it on the
bare plaster, was the original scrawl.

The officer was still living down the joke
None the less Weston thought it a waste
of time to send a ranking officer on such a
wild-goose chase.

He said so. And he went on to recount
the facts of the case as he knew them. How, -

QUEST TO CENTAURUS 77

he wanted to know, was he to proceed when
he was almost certain that every man in the
Space Corps was guilty?

Edwards listened to Weston’s objections.
He agreed, partially.

“It is admitted that the officers may have
amused themselves by writing it themselves.
But when you consider the man-hours and
the kilowatts wasted in space-chatter the
Martian War could have been finished in
thr ee months less time.

“The problem is just this, Weston. Did
it start as a joke — perhaps like the boy who
carves his initials the highest in the Old
Oak Tree — or was some agency hoping to
cause enough waste to slow up our prose-
cution of the late war?”

"I believe that it was started by some
courier,” said Weston flatly. “Then it caught
on and pyramided far beyond Jordan Green’s
expectations. Have you sought the man him-
self?”

“We’ve established that any Jordan Greens
in the service were not responsible,” said
Edwards. “However, this possible courier of
yours probably would take a pseudonym
lest fooling around with official time and
energy get him a reprimand. We want you to
track down the origin of Jordan Green! Will
you do it?”

Weston shrugged. “1 have no choice.”

Edwards turned to the man beside him.
"Commodore Atkins, will you provide Senior
Captain Weston with the necessary creden-
tials, papers, orders and insignia?”

Atkins smiled. “Come to my office, Wes-
ton. We’ll have you fixed up in a hurry.”

W ESTON rose and followed the com-
modore out of the room. Then Ed-
wards turned to the other doctor in the
conference room and took a deep breath be-
fore he said: “Well, that much is accom-
plished!”

“You’re the psychiatrist,” said the other.
“I’m just a simple surgeon. For the life of
me, I can’t see it. What happens when Wes-
ton discovers that this is just a peg-whittling
job handed out to a good man who is going
stale for lack of something to do?”

“Reconsider his case from the psychiatric
angle,” said Edwards. “Weston was an excel-
lent officer. Because of his record he was one
of twenty men selected to carry the first
projectors of Directive Power against Mars.
He was proud of being included in the Di-
rective Power attack.

“His position in the task force was one
that gave him the highest statistical chance
for success — yet with the usual trick of fate,
Weston was the first and only man whose
ship was shot to pieces in the counter-
measure defense. He never even warmed up
the secondary feeds to the Directive Power
system before he was hit.

“The rescue squadron picked him up in
bad shape. He was maintained in artificial
unconsciousness while you put him together
again — but by that time the Martians had
surrendered and the war was over. Weston
feels that he missed his big chance to go
down in history. It’s a plain case of frustra-
tion and self-guilt.”

“But how can sending him on this wild-
goose chase do any good?”

“The cure for frustration is to let the
subject either do that which he has been
barred from doing, or to give him something
as pleasing to do to divert his attention. The
way to cure the type of self-guilt that Wes-
ton has— an inner feeling of failure — is to
give him something in which he can suc-
ceed.”

“But—”

“However, we cannot start another war.
Aside from our natural reluctance, we’d
have first to develop the application of Di-
rective Power to the space drive, which will
give us interstellar flight, and we’d have to
go out in the galaxy with a chip on our
shoulder to seek such a war.

“Then Weston might be able to obtain
release. He is like the chap whose class-
mate turns up a Space Admiral while he
himself is mustered out of service because
of Venusite malaria.

“However niggling this job may be, by the
time that Weston is cured through the work
he’ll be doing he will note that all of his
former friends are envious of the very lush
job he has.

“All space-hopping, no fixed base, a roving
commission at four-mark level, an experi-
mental spacecraft and, because he is chasing
a will of the wisp that may be either malig-
nant or downright foolish, no one will ques-
tion his actions, castigate him if he fails or
scorn his job.

“Remember this, Tomlinson, any man who
goes out to unwind a wildly-tangled legend
to its core has a real job on his hands.
There must be reams and reams of conflict-
ing evidence that will itself cover up our
little work -therapy until he gets inter estf#3

78 THRILLING WONDER STORIES

in some outlandish phase of it and settles
down to work. Once he readjusts he won’t
mind a bit. Right now, however, Weston is
mingled anger and gratification.”

“Why?”

“He is happy because of the commission
ami the increase in rank and the freedom
of action. He is angry, Tomlinson, because
be knows that we have confidence in him.
His self-pity is blasted because we still
think be is a good bet.

“To continue in bis present mental state
requires that he continue to believe himself
battered by fate. In other words, to enjoy
his frustration-complex Weston must con-
tinue to be frustrated.”

“Golly!” breathed Tomlinson. “Even when
a man is slightly nuts he likes himself that
way!"

“Correct,” laughed Edwards. “That's one
of the things that makes psychiatry difficult.
It also makes Western hate any condition
which forces him to change. Now, to space
with A1 Weston; I’m hungry. How about
you?”

Tomlinson grinned, nodded and beat Doc-
tor Edwards to the door.

CHAPTER n
No Coddling, Please

ENIOR CAPTAIN ALFRED WESTON
sat in his experimental spacecraft and
wondered about it all. He had a swamped,
shut-in feeling that was growing worse as
the hours went by. He knew that he would
never have another chance as good as his
first chance with the Directive Power attack.
In that he had failed.

This job was a fool project at best. Wes-
ton had come down from one of twenty
selected men to a high-priced office boy’s
position. Not that he objected to regaining
his position in the eyes of the world via
some honest project — but if they persisted in
bringing him back along the long hard road,
it would be so very long and so very hard.

After all, he was no ensign, to rise through
the ranks gaining experience. Yet that is
what he was going to do — again. There
had to be some project worthy of his
ability!

There was conflict in his mind. One very

small portion of his brain kept telling him
that they did not hand out four-mark com-
missions, increases in rank and roving orders
to ensigns, even ensigns in fact with captain’s
ratings.

He scoffed at that, but was forced to
recognize it anyway. In a fit of sarcasm he
went to the wall beside the spacelock,
grabbed a piece of space-chart chalk and
scrawled, Jordan Green was here, too ! on the
wall.

Then he threw the chalk out the space-
lock door in a fit of temper.

The whole assignment was far beneath
his dignity. An officer of his rank should
have a (large command, not a small speedster
— even one of the desirable experimental
models. He felt like a President of the Inter-
planetary Communications Network, forced
to replace worn patch-cords in a telephone
exchange, or a President of Terra, forced
to write official letters to a number of third-
class civil service employees.

He, Alfred Weston, was being forced to
forego his command in order to snoop around
trying to locate the originator of one of the
craziest space- gags in history.

Well, so it was beneath his notice — he
could treat it with proper disdain. No doubt
the President of ICN might enjoy replacing
worn out patch-cords just to keep his hand
in. He could do the same. He could make
whatever stupid moves were necessary, make
them with an air of superiority that made
it obvious he was not extending himself,
He might appear to even be doing it for the
laughs.

Laughs! he thought. People will think
that’s all I’m to be trusted with!

He shrugged. He was on a roving com-
mission, and therefore there was no one to
watch his progress. He’d put others to work
and loaf.

He snapped the communicator, dialed the
Department for official orders, gave his rank
and commission, issued a blanket order di-
rected at the commanders at all Terran
Posts.

“Compile a cross-indexed list of all Jordan
Green markings in your command-posts.
The listings must be complete on the follow-
ing factors; text, writing material, hand-
writing index and approximate location.”

This, he knew, would take time. Perhaps
he would be forced to follow up the original
order with a more firm request. Weston
expected no results immediately.

QUEST TO CENTAURUS 79

But the mass of data that came pouring in
staggered him. It mounted high, it was com-
plex and uncorrelated. Weston’s natural dis-
like of the project made him lax in his work.
He went at it in desultory fashion, which re-
sulted in his getting far behind any schedule.
The work continued to pile up and ultimately
snowed him under.

He began to hate the sight of his desk
as the days went by and avoided it diligently.
It was groaning under the pile of paper-
work. Instead of using his ability and free-
dom to dig into the job, Weston used his
commission and his rank to enter places
formerly forbidden to him.

On the pretense of seeking Jordan Green
information, he entered the ultra-secret space
laboratory on Luna and watched work on
highly restricted technical developments. He
was especially interested in the work of
adapting Directive Power to the space drive
and, because they knew him and of him, the
scientists were quite free with information
that might have been withheld from any
visitor of rank lower than Senior Captain.

T HIS he enjoyed. It was a privilege
given to all officers of senior rank, a
type of compensation, a relaxation. That he
accepted the offer without doing his job was
unimportant to Weston. He felt that they
owed it to him.

By the time he returned from Luna, he
had more data that he merely tossed on
the pile — and it was immediately covered
by another pile of data that had come in
during his absence and was awaiting his re-
turn. He decided he was too far behind ever
to catch up, and so he loafed in the scanning
room, looking at the pile of work with a
disconnected view as though it were not
his.

His loafing was not affected by the streams
of favorable publicity he received. His pic-
ture was used occasionally; he was men-
tioned frequently in commendation. It was
well-known that the only casualty from the
First Directive Attack was working through
his convalescence on the very complex job of
uncovering the source of the Jordan Green
legend.

But Weston knew just how important his
job really was. and he ignored both it and
the glowing reports of the newspapers.

Eventually friends caught up with him
and demanded that he come along on a
party. He tried to wriggle out of it, but

they insisted. Their intention of making him
enjoy himself was obvious. He viewed them
with a certain amount of scorn, though he
said nothing about it.

If it gave them pleasure to try to lift him
out of his slough of despond he’d not stop
them, but he could avoid them and their
silly prattlings. They would not be denied,
however, so A1 Weston went, reluctantly.

Obviously for his benefit, someone had
scrawled Jordan Green was here! on the side
of the wall in Jeanne Tarbell’s home, and as
he entered the whole gang was discussing
it. They turned to him for an official opinion.

“Most of them were made the way this
one was,” he said scornfully.

Tony Larkin laughed. He turned to Jeanne.

“You see,” he said, “a lot of us had much
to do with winning the war. I’ve — found
several — myself.”

“Scrawled several,” corrected Weston
sourly.

“Don’t be bitter,” said Larkin. “Even
though you now outrank me, you shouldn’t
change from boyish prank to official pomp
overnight.”

“Maybe you’d like to have as silly a job
hung on you,” snapped Weston.

“If the commish and the roving order and
all went with it — I’d take to it like a duck
to water.”

“Is that all you’re good for?” asked Weston
scornfully.

“Look, Al, I’m a plain captain in this man’s
Space Corps,” returned Larkin. “Anytime
I want to sweep up the floor in my office I’ll
do it, see? One — no one can do it better, and
two— no one can say that sweeping floors
is my top position in life.

“It isn’t a loss of dignity to exhibit your
skill in ditch-digging or muck-raking. It
makes you more human when people know
that, despite your gold braid, you aren’t
afraid to get your hands as dirty as theirs.
At least they didn’t plant you in the front
office because you’d make a mess of working
in the machine shop.”

“You’d not like to be ordered to a dirty
job,” snapped Weston.

“If it had to be done and I was told to do
it, I’d do it and do it quick. You can take
a bath afterwards and wash off the dirt, —
and be the gainer for knowing how the
Other Half lives!”

Weston turned and walked out. Larkin
frowned sorrowfully and apologized to
Jeanne and the rest. Tom Brandt shrugged.

80 THRILLING WONDER STORIES

“We all agree, Tony,” he said. “But drum-
ming at him will do no good. He’ll have to
find himself on his own time.”

J EANNE nodded and went out after
Weston.

“Al,” she said, pleading, “come back and
be the man we used to know.”

“I can’t,” he said. He was utterly dejected.
“But you can. It’s in you. Apply your-
self. So this is a poor job in your estima-
tion. If it is beneath your ability you should
be able to do it with one hand.”

“You too?” he said bitterly. “I thought
you’d see things my way.”

“I do, honestly. But, Al, I can’t turn back
the clock. I can’t give you another chance
at the Directive thing. You did not fail. No
one thinks you did or they’d not trust you
with a high rank and a free commission. You
were the victim of sheer chance and none
of it was your fault.”

“But why did it happen to me?” he cried
bitterly. “Why couldn’t I have been success-
ful?”

“Someone was bound to get it,” she said
simply. “You prefer your own skin to some-
one else’s?”

“Wouldn’t you — if the chips were down?”
She nodded. “Certainly. But I don’t think
I’d hate everybody that was successful if I
were the unlucky one.”

“Then they top it off by giving me this
stupid job.”

“Maybe you think that unraveling a legend
is child’s play. Well, Alfred Weston, satis-
fying the demands or the interest of a few
billion people as to the truth of Jordan
Green is no small item!

“He who satisfies the public interest is
far more admired than a captain of indus-
try or a ruler of people. And if this job is
a boy’s work why did they send a man to do
it, complete with increase in rank and a
roving commission?”

“Because Jordan Green was of no im-
portance until they needed a simple job to
use in coddling a man they consider a simple-
ton!” growled Weston.

“And you are the man they selected to
join with the Directive Power attack,” she
said, stepping back and inspecting him care-
fully. “Well, suppose you complete this
simple job first. Then let’s see whether you
can accomplish something you consider
worthy of your stature.”

“You’re insulting,” he said shortly.

“You wouldn’t be able to recognize an
insult,” she said scornfully. She turned
and left the place with tears in her eyes.
Tony Larkin intercepted her and dried her
eyes.

“It’s tough,” he told her. “But until he
shakes the feeling that Fate is against him
he’ll be poor company. Eventually every-
body will dislike him and then he’ll have
nothing to do but to go ahead and work.

“Whatever initial success comes will break
his interest in himself. He’ll go at it in
desperation, in hatred perhaps, but he’ll
emerge with a sense of humor again. Until
then, Jeanne, you’ll have to sit and suffer
with the rest of us.”

“But was that Jordan Green job wise?”

“I can think of a thousand officers who
would tackle it with shouts of glee,” he
said. “Lady, what a lark! I’d be giving
cryptic statements to the press and having a
daisy of a time all over the Solar System.

“Weston is one of us. When he regains his
perspective he’ll view it the same way — as
a lark! Right now, though,” he said seriously,
“it’s best that he stay out of the public eye.
I’d hate to have the Space Corps judged
by his standards.”

“I guess we all feel sorry for him,” she
said.

“Yeah, but it’s sorrow for his mental
state and not for the cause. Now forget him
and enjoy yourself.”

CHAPTER III
The Cold Trail

W ESTON strode from the party in an
angry frame of mind that left him
only as he entered his own ship. His anger
simmered down to resentment and a bulldog
determination to show them all. So they
had sent a man to do a boy’s work! Well,
he would apply himself and ship them the
answer complete down to the last decimal
place!

If he had to catalogue every Jordan Green
mark as to place and location in a long list
and show proof of just which joking officer
had scrawled it there, by heaven he’d do it.
And if it made every man in the Corps a
joker, that was too bad. But he would dig
out the writer of each and every scrawl in

QUEST TO CENTAURUS 81

the Solar System if it took the rest of his life.

He faced the piles of data and set to work
with determination born of burning resent-
ment. Morning came, and he was still sort-
ing, filing, deciding. The card-sorter clicked
regularly, dropping the tiny cards into piles
that were cross-indexed and tabulated on a
master card. Reports in lengthy form, mere
cards of terse data, incomplete reports — all
of them he went after and scanned care-
fully to make some sort of mad pattern if he
could.

He found himself weak from lack of sleep
and fought it off with hot coffee and benze-
drine until he 'had succeeded in unraveling
the now-dusty pile of data. It was full of
erroneous information and false data. If
Jordan Green existed he was well-covered
by the scrawlings of men who wanted to
perpetuate the joke. But, finished, he sat
back in amazement.

Of thirty thousand such scrawlings,
twenty-seven thousand were written in the
same manner!

Top it — they were written with the same
chalk!

Top that — they were unmistakably in the
same handwriting!

“Now where in hades did any one man
get so much time?” A1 Weston asked him-
self.

He pored over a globe of Terra, stuck
pins in it to show the location, then studied
it to see if any pattern could be made of the
grand scramble. There was apparently none,
so he took a Mercator and did the same,
standing off in a dim fight to see if the pin-
points caused any ‘lining’ of the vision into
some recognizable pattern.

He got a chart of Mars and studied it. He
tried to make the spatter-pattern of Mars
line up to agree with the pin-pattern of
Terra. He turned it this way and that to
see. He photographed both and laid them
on top of one another, and finally gave up.
There was no significance.

He went to bed and, the next morning,
dropped his ship at Marsport.

“I’ve a four-mark commission,” he said
sharply to the office aide at Marsquarters.

“I’ll request an audience for you,” said
the office aide. He should, by all rights, be
slightly cowed by the senior captain’s rank
and the free commission, but he was aide
to the High Brass of conquered Mars and
larger brass than this had come and gone —
unsatisfied.

“See here, I’m on a roving commission and
I want aid.”

“Yes sir, 111 request you an audience — ”
“Blast!” snarled Weston angrily. “I’m not
fooling.”

“No one fools here,” returned the aide.
“Are you being insolent?”

“Not if I can avoid it, sir. But you under-
stand that I am responsible only to Admiral
Callahan. I am doing his bidding and those
are his wishes.”

“You’ve not spoken to him about them.”
“I need not — which is why I’m his aide.
You see, sir, I’m not trying to tell you your
business, but there is a lot of important work
going on here.”

“Will you contact him?”

“No, sir.”

“I order you.”

“I’d think twice, sir. I am not being per-
sonally obstinate nor am I ignorant of your
rank. Senior Captain Weston. But I know
Admiral Callahan’s temperament.”

“My order stands,” said Weston, “I w r ill
be received.”

“Yes sir. I’m sorry, sir.” The aide turned
and entered the office. He emerged, shortly
afterwards and motioned for A1 to enter.
Weston cast a down-his-nose glance at the
aide, then shut the door behind him. Against
the wall beside the door was a scrawled
legend.

“Jordan Green has been here, too!”

T HE style w 7 as unmistakable — as unmis-
takable as the wrath that greeted him.
“Explain, Senior Captain Weston!”

“I am on a roving commission, rank four-
mark. I — ”

“I’m aware of your rank, your mission and
your commission. Come to the point. I want
to know why you think you are more im-
portant than anybody else!”

“I — have not that opinion, sir.”

“You must have it, or you’d not have
behaved as you did! Come on, speak.”
“Well, sir, I’ve uncovered a rather star-
tling bit—-”

“So what? So you demand my time to dis-
cuss a space gag with me? So they’re all
the same handwriting. Any idiot at Intelli-
gence could have told you that. They covered
that phase when Jordan Green first appeared.
They were suspicious. Here!”

Admiral Callahan strode to a file cabinet
and took out a thick file. He hurled it at A1
Weston.

82 THRILLING WONDER STORIES

“Read it and learn some sense, young man.
Now get out of here and don’t bother coming
back.”

Weston took the file and left His ears
were burning and his mind was a tangle of
cross-purposes and emotions. That was a
rotten way to treat a man who’d been shot
down on the first directive expedition.

He’d like to clip the so-and-so admiral’s
wings a bit He’d — take it — he guessed, sour-
ly, hearing a slight snicker behind him. He
turned angrily but there was no one near.

That snicker? Was it real, or merely a
breath of wind against the Venetian blind?

He entered the first bar he found. “Pulga
and water,” he said.

The bartender winced. “Does the Terran
Captain forget that this is Mars?”

Weston had, but this was no time to admit
a mistake.

“Not at aU,” he said.

“May I ask the Terran Captain to change
his order?”

“I want it as I said it,” snapped Weston.

“Does the Terran Captain understand
that water is not plentiful? We on Mars have
not the — the — plumbing as on Terra, where
you cannot live without your water. We
use but little personally and that mostly for
washing. In washing, we absorb sufficient for
our own metabolism.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“Then the Terran Captain may also be
aware of the fact that our water is not
— well — suited for internal consumption?”

“You have no bottled water?” demanded
Weston angrily.

“That will be found only on the Terran
Post. Please, be not angry. All newcomers
forget.”

“Forget it,” snapped Weston and walked
out.

Even the lowly bartenders of a con-
quered race made a fool of him. He entered
another bar down the street and asked for
pulga and vin, a completely native Martian
potable. It was served without argument
and went down right

He had another and was halfway through
it when he turned to see friends entering.

“Al!” they called. “How’s it, man?”

W ITH a weak smile he set down his
drink and held out a welcoming

hand.

“Hi, fellows. Haven’t seen you in a year,
Jack, Nor you, Bill. What’s new?”

“Nothing much. Golly, we thought you
were a real goner when they hit you that,
fatal day.”

“I don’t remember,” said Weston,

“I’ll bet you don’t,” said Bill with a
smile. “You dropped back out of formation
in a flaming instant and were gone. The
rest of us were all right and won through.
We hit Mars about o-three-hundred the next
afternoon and, brother, did we hit ’em.

“We hurled the directive beam right down
in the middle of Kanthanappois and laid the
city flat! Then we headed North to Mont-
harrin and singed ’em gently around the
edges. You have no idea, Al boy, what
a fierce thing you can toss out of a one-
seater scooter when you’ve got directive
power in it.

“They’ve never got the Fresno Beams
down to a size practical for anything smaller
than an eight-man job, you know. Well, di-
rectives make it possible to handle a four-
turret from a one-man job. And a super-
craft can carry enough stuff to move Mars.”

“I missed it.”

“We know, and we’re sorry about that.
Well, we can’t all win.”

“Don’t be patronizing,” snapped Al Wes-
ton.

“Sorry. We knew you’d have given most
anything to have joined in the ruckus. Well
— say, Al, I hear you’ve got a snap job
now?”

“Well,” said Al, disagreeing that it was
a snap, and at the same time trying to
justify its importance, “I’m trying to dig out
the truth of this Jordan Green thing.”

“You mean like over there?” grinned
Jack, pointing to the legend on the wall.

“Uh — yeah, excuse me a moment,” said
Weston, going over and looking at it care-
fully.

“Getting to be an authority, hey, Al?”
laughed Bill. “Gosh, that’s a laugh of a job.
Bet you have your fun.”

“I think it is slightly stupid,” said Weston
harshly.

“Could be. It’s no more stupid than a lot
of jobs in this man’s space navy, though.
They sent a space admiral out once to meas-
ure the major diameter of all spacecraft to
the maximum thousandth of an inch and
didn’t tell him for weeks that it had a deep
purpose.

“He fumed and fretted until he discovered
that it took a space admiral to hold enough
rank to be permitted to measure that stuff

QUEST TO CENTAURUS 83

under the security regulations. Later they
made all external space gear universal so
that replacement quantities could be re-
duced. It saved about seven billion bucks —
enough to pay the admiral’s salary for a
couple of millennia.”

Jack laughed. “It’s usually some lucky bird
that gets these cockeyed commissions and
has a swell time loafing all over the solar
system on the government’s dough.”

“I don’t consider myself lucky.”

“We do,” chimed one of the men. “We’re
stuck here along with seven million other
high-brass policemen who’d rather play
marbles,” said Bill. “So what does it matter
what you’re doing, actually, so long as you’re
paying your way?”

“Well, I’d prefer something a bit more in
my line.”

“Who wouldn’t?” responded Jack. “But
what the heck? Remember the lines from
Gilbert & Sullivan — The Private Buffoon?
‘They won’t blame you so long as you’re
funny’!”

“Very amusing,” said Weston.

“Well, shucks, anytime you want to swap
jobs — ”

“I wouldn’t mind,” said Weston wistfully.

“Look, chum, take it easy. You wouldn’t
like sitting on your unretractable landing
gear eight hours a day listening to a bunch
of dirty Marties trying to talk you into
slipping them a bit of a lush. Make you
damned sick.

“But it’s a job we’ve got to do and so long
as we’re hung with it, we’re hung, and
we’ll give it our best We know we can do
most anything, so why should we worry?”

Bill grinned and nodded. “I’ll bet even
the bartender wouldn’t like our job. Hey
Soupy!”

“Would the Terran officers desire some-
thing?”

“Can you be honest?”

“Can anyone?” returned the barkeep. Like
all barkeeps, he was about to start walking
a fence between customers.

“How would you like to have my job?”

The barkeep looked at Bill. “You want an
answer?”

Bill nodded.

T HE barkeep shook his head. “Too much
trouble. I am happy as I am. I, Terran
officers, can mix the best veliqua on Mars,
and no one on Terra can mix one at all. So
I cannot drive a spacer, nor build a long

range communicator. But I mix the best
veliqua — observe ? ”

They observed as the barkeep made rapid
motions with several bottles, whirled them
overhead and came in on a tangent landing
with three glasses, brimful to a bulging
meniscus, without spilling a drop.

“Personally,” grinned Bill, “I think we’ve
just been hydraulic-pressured into buying a
drink.”

“Smart lad, he.”

“I’d not put up with that We didn’t ask
for it” objected Weston,

“No? Well, so what,” grinned Bill, lifting
the glass.

“It’s okay,” said Jack “But look, Al. You
still sound as though you were enjoying life
— or should be.”

“I’m not.”

“Well, Al, if you aren’t, it’s your fault”

“It wasn’t my fault that I got clipped?”

“Hardly. No one is putting any blame on
you for getting hung on the wrong end of a
beam. Despite popular rumor, they don’t
hand out them things for cutting your hand
on a can-opener,” said Bill, nodding toward
the purple ribbon on Weston’s breast. It was
beside another colored bit, awarded for his
efforts in the initial directive attack.

“That one,” said Weston, catching Bill’s
eye, “was a consolation prize. I didn’t earn
it.”

“My friend, you must learn to tell the
difference between humility and the job
of fishing for compliments. Well, chum,
you’ve had a rough time and we gotta go
back and play traffic cop. Let us know if
there’s anything we can do.”

Weston nodded. They left. They left
him alone. Far back in his mind something
mentioned the fact that they were on duty,
but he thought they could have stayed
around a bit longer.

He drank too much that long Martian
afternoon and was definitely hung over most
of the next day.

Al Weston gave up at that point Never
again would he try to prove his sorry plight
to any one of his former friends. They all
insisted upon looking at the brighter side
of his life and ignored his trouble as though
it did not exist.

They were glad enough to see him alive,
it seemed, when he’d have preferred death
to this lack-luster existence He wondered
whether any of them would worry about him
if he disappeared. Perhaps if they thought

84 THRILLING WONDER STORIES

he were dead —

Well, he had a four-mark commission,
which entitled him among other things to
commandeer anything now in the experi-
mental field. He’d make a show of com-
mandeering a directive power drive and then
drop out of sight.

They’d suspect both his untimely end, and
suspect the advisability of the directive
drive. Then he’d show up and prove both
worthy. That would give him his prestige
again.

He’d do it at Pluto and, on the way, he’d
stop at every way-station long enough to
leave a wide trail. He’d enter a post, discuss
Jordan Green at length. He’d take pictures,
make tests and then head outward — to dis-
appear for about a vear. That would fix them
all.

CHAPTER IV
Free For ATI

P LUTO,” said A1 Weston drily. He’d
come through the entrance dome of
one of the sealed cities and was standing
atop the Corps Administration building,
looking out over the sprawling city. Since
Pluto was utterly cold, the sealed cities
were the only habitable places on the planet
and even they were too chilly for comfort.

He had no Pluto-garb, but he did have
his spaceman’s suit, which was internally
heated. He, like most of the Corpsmen there,
wore the spaceman’s suit with the fishbowl
swung back across his shoulderblades.

Some of them had had the helmets re-
moved entirely, though this was trouble-
some around the entrance-locks because
none of the men who were without their
fishbowl headgear could work outside of the
inner lock.

But — this was Pluto, and from here, as
soon as he could leave, A1 Weston was head-
ing, just plain out!

In accordance with regulations he reported
to the port commandant’s office. This time
he had no intention of forcing entry to the
Inner Sanctum. His ears were still red from
his last abortive effort. All he intended to do
was to report to the office aide and, if the
Big Brass wanted to see him, he’d eventually
call.

Inside of the office was the usual scrawl —

Yes, Jordan Green has been even here!

It was authentic and Weston said so aloud.
The office aide looked up. “You’re Senior
Captain Weston?”

“I’m known?” asked he, slightly sur-
prised.

“By reputation,” grinned the clerk. “It’s
said that you can tell an authentic Jordan
Green by seeing it through a visiscope.”
“Not quite,” said Weston.

“Have you uncovered anything yet, sir?”
asked the aide.

“Are you interested?”

“Everyone is interested,” said the clerk.
“It will make a darned amusing yarn when
you get all done.”

“Uh-huh,” grunted Weston. Amusing, he
thought. Was his value to the Space Corps
only an amusement value?

“See here,” he said to the clerk, ‘Td like to
try a directive power drive.”

“You were on the first directive power
expedition against Mars, weren’t you?”
mused the clerk. “According to custom and
regulations, you are entitled to any experi-
mental equipment that you used during the
war. Seems to me, too. that you are prob-
ably using more power for space flight than
about ninety- eight percent of the corps at the
present time. We have a directive power
unit here.”

“Then I can have it immediately?”

The clerk nodded. “I’m merely rumi-
nating,” he said to Weston. “I’d prefer sev-
eral good reasons why you took it other than
your fancy to try it out. It’ll make the Old
Man less fratchy.

“It’s slightly haywire, of course, since it
came right from the Power Laboratory with
a boatload of long-hairs on a test mission.
They left it here and we’ve been tinkering
with it off and on. We can get a new one in
a month or so, but you can have the haywire
model if you’d prefer not to wait.”

“I’ll take it.”

“Okay. I’ll issue orders for the engine
gang to swap power in your crate.”
“Thanks.” said Weston.

“Oh, and sir, I almost forgot. It’s just an
unfounded rumor and I’ve been unable to
check the truth of it, but they claim there’s
a Jordan Green scrawl on Nergal, too.”
“Nergal?” said Weston explosively. His
mind envisioned a minute hunk of cosmic
dust not much more than a hundred miles
in diameter — Pluto’s only claim to a satellite.
It was better than thirteen million miles from

QUEST TO CENTAUSUS 85

Pluto and its rotation was necessarily slow
due to its tiny mass and great distance.

I T HAD been and would continue to be
for some years, the solar object most
distant from Sol.

It was uninhabited, airless, cold, forbidding,
and completely useless.

There "was not even a station on it. Sci-
ence found the airless outer surface of
Pluto more to their liking. On Pluto, at
least, there was gravity to hold them down.
The escape velocity of Nergal was not really
known, but it must have been minute.

“Might be sheer fancy,” said the clerk
apologetically.

“Better check on it,” said Weston. This
was an opportunity. When he left it would
be recorded that he went to Nergal. He
even wished that he’d started to write his
own name under the countless Jordan Green
scrawls he’d visited. Then they could find
one out there, and know he’d been there and
from there . . . ?

In relaxation uniform, Weston sat in a
small, out of the way restaurant and finished
his dinner. He was the only uniformed man
in the place, and so when the unlovely pair
behind him made mention of the Corps, he
knew they were talking about him.

He did not know them by name, but after
a glimpse of them immediately labeled one of
them as ‘Dirty’ and the other one as ‘Ratty’.
It was Ratty’s voice that caught his atten-
tion. He missed the statement, but caught
Dirty’s answer.

“By the time all the Fancy Brass gets
them, maybe we can have a couple too.”
“The war’s over,” Ratty snarled. “Why
does the Corps need directive drives?”
“How should I know? Ask Pretty, up
there.”

“He wouldn’t know,” snapped Ratty.
“He’s just taking orders.”

“Must be nice to roam all over space with
your feed and power free."

“Yeah, but he’d go broke if he had to
live on what he’s worth.”

“That’s why most guys get in the Corps
anyway.”

“That guy is spending about thirty thou-
sand bucks just to track down a myth.”
“Maybe his myth has a sister for me?”
guffawed Dirty. “Wonder where he was
hiding when the shooting was going on.”
“He wouldn’t say,” grunted Ratty. “Mosta
the dirty work was done by draftees.”

“Well, now the schemozzle is over, he’ll
come out beating his chest and telling how
he won the war. I’ll bet he piloted a office
desk and got that wound ribbon from pinch-
ing his finger in a desk drawer.”

“Yeah, the Corps is rotten with slinkers.”
“He’s tooken months to track down this
myth. Bet he makes it another year. Then
they’ll hang a medal on him for it.”

“Any good spaceman could run Jordan
Green down in a week,” grunted Ratty.

“But it wouldn’t be profitable to do it
quick,” answered Dirty with a leer in his
voice.

Weston got up and went to their table.
“Sit down!” he snarled. “You, too!” he
snapped at Dirty, taking the man by the
jacket front and ramming him back in his
chair with a crash. Heads looked up, and
men faded back out of the way, clearing the
area.

“One,” said Weston. “I was in the hospi-
tal for seven months, unconscious from a
fracas off Mars with the first directive power
attack. Remember? I was doing a job so
that stinkers like you could roam space un-
bothered by Martie pirates. Where were
you? Hiding in a mine somewhere?

“At the present time if I spend five years
rambling all over space looking for Jordan
Green, you’ll still owe me plenty. I wasn’t
making money while I was fighting. How
much did you make? If it hadn’t been for
the Corps you’d be dead.”

W ESTON cuffed Dirty across the face
with the back of his hand and spat
into Ratty’s face.

They rose with a roar and Ratty hurled
table and chairs out of the way. They rushed
Weston heavily.

Weston grinned.

He drove his fist into Ratty’s stomach and
sliced Dirty’s throat with the edge of his
hand.

Here was something tangible for Weston to
fight! For almost a year, he had been rail-
ing at the wind, storming at an invisible
hand of fate that had clipped him hard. The
men before him were the embodiment of
all his ill luck and he drove into them with
a burning hatred to maim and destroy.

It was a dirty fight. The space rats had
no qualms about sportsmanship and Weston
had been tumble-trained on Terra to accept
battle only when it was inevitable, at which
point nothing was barred.

86 THRILLING WONDER STORIES

Dirty came in, hammering at his abdo-
men, and got a knee in the face. Ratty pulled
a knife and rushed in with a slicing swing.
Weston faded back, hit the bar, felt its edge
crease his back as the rats moved after
him.

He lashed out with a foot and drove Ratty
and his knife back, turned to roll with a
roundhouse swing from Dirty and his right
arm knocked over a beer bottle. His right
hand closed on the neck of the bottle, and
he rapped it sharply against the edge of the
bar, knocking off the base.

He kneed Dirty and closed with Ratty. He
caught the knife-wielder in the face with the
jagged bottle and thrust him back with a
twisting punch of the bottle. There was a
wordless scream.

Weston caught Dirty in the ribs with a
hard fist and then cracked the man’s head
with what was left of the bottle. It shattered
completely as Dirty staggered back and Wes-
ton dropped the useless end. They closed
again, and wrestled viciously across the floor,
tripped over a table and went down with a
crash in a tight lock.

Dirty swung his elbow free and Weston
missed catching it in the throat by a mite.
Weston let go of Dirty’s wrist and grabbed
Dirty by the collar. Up he lifted and down
he slammed.

Dirty’s head made a thudding crack against
the floor,

“Rye,” gasped Weston and swallowed it
neat

Then he walked out, paused at the door
and said:

"Call the cops and tell ’em to pick up—”

He left with a quizzical smile. He didn’t
even know their names.

He didn’t stop to clean up, but entered
his ship immediately. The directive power
drive had been installed and he made radio
contact with the control center that opened
the locks in the sealed city.

He went out with a rush and hit the high
trail for Nergal.

They’d give him a stupid job, would they?
Well, he’d frittered enough on it. Now he
was going to polish this off in a hurry and go
back and hurl his commission in the teeth of
Big Brass and stamp out snarling. A big
strong man hunting a myth . . . !

ERGAL appeared within minutes under
the directive drive. He landed and
slapped tiie magnets cm to keep him down.

If there were anything to this rumor Jordan
Green would have needed a wall or some-
thing to write his name on.

In the scanner Weston searched every
square yard of his horizon and then moved.
Four times he moved, each time searching
his very limited line of sight circle. The
fifth time he came upon a sheet of metal,
fixed to a metal post, emanating out of a
box.

He looped the ship into the air, caught
box and post with a tractor and pulled it
into the airlock.

Drifting free, he inspected the slab of
metal.

Jordan Green has been here, it said in
bold letters.

And below, on the top of the box, there
was a pointer in gimbals. A surveyor’s
telescope. Gyro -stabilized it was and it
pointed off slightly below the plane of the
ecliptic. Weston took it to the observation
dome and applied his eye to it as it stood.
In the narrow field he saw the stars, and the
crosshairs centered on a small one. Around
the circumference of the reticule, tiny letters
shone:

Jordan Green has been there too!

The star was Proxima Centauri.

“Oh, yeah?” growled Weston angrily.
“That I have to see!”

Feeling challenged and outraged, A1 Wes-
ton shoved in the Directive Power Drive all
the way and headed across interstellar space
for Proxima Centauri.

“Jordan Green!” he growled as the ship
passed above the velocity of light. “That
Jordan Green!”

He forgot the incongruity of A1 Weston,
the first man to penetrate interstellar space
— seeking a phantom that claimed to have
been on Alpha Centauri or, more practically,
on one of the star’s planets. All that Weston
knew was that Jordan Green had been
having fun at the expense of the Space
Corps, just as Ratty and Dirty had in riding
him.

It was a private fight. He might hate the
High Command’s brass but let no craven
civilian criticize so much as the polish on the
buttons of the third-assistant lubrication
technician’s uniform!

Jordan Green indeed! Well, Senior Cap-
tain Alfred Weston would bring this Jordan
Green in by the ears.

And then they’d let Jordan Green explain
his pranks.

QUEST TO CENTAURUS 87

CHAPTER V
Trail’s End

T HE humiliation of his project died. He
began to feel a hearty dislike for Jor-
dan Green. Not only had the joker caused
waste of time and money and kilowatts dur-
ing the war, he was now instrumental in the
expenditure of time and money — and was
keeping a qualified ranking officer from per-
forming a task compatible with his training.

Weston growled and swore to finish up this
job in quick time. He could then return to
his rightful position and do a job that would
set him up in his friends’ eyes once more.

He considered Tony Larkin — a good
enough fellow. Jeanne Tarbell — well, after
all, he’d been ill and no girl could sit around
all the time. Larkin was a nice enough egg
and could be trusted. But Larkin would
have to take a seat far to the rear when
Weston returned!

He’d really show ’em!

The experimental spacecraft, driven by the
experimental directive power unit, bored
deeper and deeper into interstellar space and
its velocity mounted high, running up an
exponential scale that was calculated in
terms of multiples of the speed of light.

He calculated turnover from sheer theory
and a grasp of higher mathematics, since the
heavens were an angry gray-blue outside
of his ports. Then he decelerated and began
to wait for the long long hours to pass be-
fore he could see how close his calculations
were.

His clocks and chronometers went haywire
and he lost track of time. He slept at odd
moments, as he had done on the acceleration-
half of this first interstellar trip.

The idea of interstellar travel came home
to him. He, A1 Weston, was making the first
interstellar trip. The incongruity was not
considered. He knew that he would find Jor-
dan Green on some planet of Proxima
CentaurL He began to enjoy the idea. His
friends, Tom, Bill, Jack, all of them had con-
sidered him lucky. Well, confound Jordan
Green, he was lucky!

And, regardless of what Jordan Green
meant, he’d go down in history, not as a
conquerer that went out with the Solar
System’s most destructive invention, but as
the first peacetime user of directive power
for interstellar flight. He’d comb the Cen-

taurian system, and then return home with
proof. He’d be his own hero!

His ship’s velocity topped below light
and he set course for- Proxima IV as a guess.
He checked the panoramic receiver, located
one very heavy signal coming from that
planet and knew that he was right.

Not only would he be a Terran celebrity,
he would also be an ambassador — first inter-
stellar user of directive power and first dis-
coverer of an extra-solar race of intelli-
gences!

The planet was unpopulated!

Thick jungle covered it and it was full of
wild life. On no hand could he see any sign
of culture. There was no evidence but the
single heavy signal, which he tracked half-
way around the jungle-laden planet to land
in a clearing beside a huge, white marble
building.

On the lintel above the door were * the
words, in letters of shimmering jewel-like
substance.

Here lives Jordan Green!

Weston smiled cynically. This — was it!
He polished the knuckles of his right hand
in the palm of his left hand, flexed both
hands, loosed the needier in his holster and
strode forward, hands at his sides, alert.

He hit the door with a hard straight-
arm and sent it crashing open.

H E FACED four people, three men and a
woman.

“Well, well!” he said, one portion of his
mind wondering what to do about the woman
when the shooting started. He disliked harm-
ing women but he knew that women had no
compunctions against doing a man as best
they could.

“Which of you — or how many of you —
is or are Jordan Green?”

“Why?” asked the elder man mildly.
“Because I want to strangle him — or even
her — slowly and painfully! Then I’m taking
him — he, she or it — back to Terra to answer
some questions!”

“Why?” asked the man. “Has he harmed
you?”

Weston stopped short. To be honest with
himself, Jordan Green had harmed no one,
but he had been a plagued nuisance at least
to Weston personally. Jordan Green was a
sort of a symbol of something that caused
him trouble.

“See here,” he said. “They hung the job
of locating Jordan Green on me, thinking

88 THRILLING WONDER STORIES

I needed some sort of cockeyed feather nest
of a job because I couldn’t handle anything
real. I didn’t want it, but they’ve tossed
time and money into the job.

“Me — I want to take the joker back by the
ears and show them that at least I’m worth
their time and money and let them figure
out whether my efforts were worth it. At
least I’ve paid my way and done what they
wanted me to do! Now — which?”

“What do you intend to do then?” asked
the man. The younger man headed for a
huge machine that stood inert, its pilot lights
glimmering to show that it was ready to per-
form. The older called something in a
strange tongue and the other one stopped and
turned with puzzlement written in every line
of his body.

“W 7 ho are you?” gritted Weston.

“I am called Dalenger. He is Valentor,
she, his sister, Jasentor. The fourth is
Desentin.”

“I’m stupefied,” gritted Weston. “A fine
bunch of nom de plumes. Who are you? Or
do I take you all back?”

“Tell me. Why are you angry?” asked
Dalenger.

A1 Weston told them. He told them of his
ambition and his hopes and his own personal
defeats — and though he did not know it he
was extending himself to convince a total
stranger that he, Weston, was a very unhappy
man.

“And now, which of you is responsible
for all the scribbling that’s been going on?”
he concluded.

Dalenger smiled. “Please sit down, Senior
Captain Weston. Jasey! Get him a dollop of
refreshments. I think we’re about a have a
talk!”

“Get to the point,” snapped Weston.

“Patience, my friend. Look. Look well
and see this room. We are official observers
for the Galactic Union. We — ”

“The what?” exploded Weston.

“In the galaxy are seventy-four suns, all
peopled with humanoid races, entire stellar
systems of us. We all possess what you call
directive power. Not only is directive power
the key to interstellar flight, but it is also
the key to supremacy. That machine back
there is an example. If the button behind
the safety door is pressed your star will be-
come a supernova because of our develop-
ment of directive power.

“With such a means of wiping out an
entire star-system, we must be certain that

any newcomers who develop directive power
will not be of a culture that is basically
warlike, or filled with manifest destiny to
rule the galaxy.

“This is harsh judgment, Senior Captain
Weston, but it is a matter of being harsh
or losing our lives. We are not cruel, but
we are not soft where our future is at stake.

“Ergo, our detectors cover the galaxy, a
job that would be impossible to do manually.
At the first release of directive power we
set up an observation post, such as you
have found here, and we provide means to
ensure a quick decision.

“When the first flight arrives we can judge
the culture from the men who come with
it. If the culture is favorable to the Galactic
Union it is joined. If it is inimical or un-
desirable in any way, their sun becomes a
supernova, wiping out the undesirable civili-
zation immediately.”

Weston looked at Dalenger with a hard,
cynical glance.

“Like to play at being God?” he asked
sharply.

“We do not. But we like to live!”

“You, I gather, are responsible for that
Jordan Green gag?”

D ALENGER smiled. “Yes. Your people
have no doubt wondered how the fel-
low could get around as he did. Actually, it
was a con trolled -writing, using directive
power from here. We have come no closer to
your sun than this. Our grasp of your lan-
guage was obtained by reading books, by
listening to your radio and by other means
— all available across the light-years by
directive power.

“You see,” said Dalenger, “if we came as
emissaries we would be shown only that
which your leaders wanted us to see. If
we came as spies there would always be
suspicion in your minds. Our spying is re-
stricted to learning your language and setting
up the means by which you will seek us
out.”

“But this Jordan Green business?”
“There are a number of reasons why a
race will seek the origin of such a joke. A
well-developed sense of humor and the will-
ingness to spend money on such is desirable.
Suspicion is not bad, depending upon
whether it is sheer hatred of the alien or a
desire to maintain integrity.”

Weston thought for a moment. They were
going to judge his race by him. He con-

QUEST TO CENTAURUS 89

sidered and came to the conclusion that he
was a sorry specimen to grade an entire
culture on,

“How can you grade a race on one speci-
men?” he said.

“Since the specimen is usually a competent
man, highly trained, a scientist, we normally
discount him a bit. A hand-picked sample
is never representative, but represents the
peak of the race.”

Weston swallowed. “But look,” he said.
“That is not fair. I’m — ”

“Senior Captain Weston, you strode in
here angry. You displayed no sense of
humor. You snarled and promised us all
bodily harm and accused us of having inter-
fered with your plans. Right?”

“Yes— but— ”

“Yet,” said Dalenger, “you were changing.
You see, Weston, you were a sick man.
There is one characteristic that is quite de-
sirable. It is a sense of social responsibility
to the individual by the collective govern-
ment. Most undesirable is the type that
claims the individual must be immersed in
the good of the state.

“In one extension this sense is called pity.
In the other extension it is called pride. You
were hurt and you became ill mentally. And,
instead of casting you out, your fellow men
gave you a job that would result in your
convalescence regardless of success or fail-
ure, providing that you yourself managed
to follow through— in any manner. You did,

by desperation and anger.

“We don’t always judge by the mental
calibre of the man who comes. We must
consider the reason why he was selected. We
don’t value personal feelings in judgment of
a race — we’d be inevitably wrong if we
valued the opinion of a psychoneurotic.

“The judging was finished when I called
Desentin to stop. He is young and impetu-
ous and was about to press the button. So,
Senior Captain Alfred Weston, we welcome
you and your race to the Galactic Union!”

Weston blinked. He’d fought against it.
He’d been angry at something every instant
of the time between his awakening after the
disaster to the present moment — angry be-
cause there was nothing he could do to
gain real recognition. So they hung a joke-
job on him to cure him!

And, by the grace of the gods and a long-
handled spoon, he had walked into a situa-
tion that might have caused the destruction
of the entire Solar System but for some deep
understanding on the part of an alien cul-
ture.

He — A1 Weston, psychoneurotic — in the
position of being an emissary!

He took the glass offered by Jasentor,
lifted it to the four of them and drained it
with a gesture.

And for the first time in more than a
year, the sound of Weston’s honest laughter
filled the room.

Cured!

Kim Rendell Battles Again to Save
the Second Galaxy from Attack!

T HE brilliant hero of “The Disciplinary Circuit” and “The
Manless Worlds” returns in another exciting and amazing
novel next issue! His services as a matter-transmitter tech-
nician are called on when the matter-transmitter on Ter-
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most astonishing adventures of his career!

Follow Kim Rendell’s exploits as he struggles to save the freedom-loving Second
Galaxy from being brought under the control of the disciplinary circuit in the hands
of unscrupulous tyrants! If you enjoyed Murray Leinster’s previous great novels fea-
turing Kim Rendell, you will be more than enthusiastic about THE BOOMERANG
CIRCUIT, by MURRAY LEINSTER, next issue’s featured complete novel. It’s one
of the year’s finest science fiction treats!

Eight small figures, dad in buck shin teggins am! with scalp locks, materialized or the rug

THE RELUCTANT SHAMAN

By Su SPRAGUE E)E CAMP

Virgil Hathaway, Penobscot medicine man , suddenly finds
himself the possessor of eight stone-throwing sprites!

jgrjjk NE fine July day a tourist took his
■ "1 small boy into a shop in Gahato, New

York. The sign over the shop read:

CHIEF SOARING TURTLE

Indian Bead-Work — Pottery

Inside, a stocky, copper-colored man stood
amidst a litter of burnt-leather cushions,

Navajo blankets made in Connecticut, and
similar truck.

“Have you got a small bow-and-arrow out-
fit?” the tourist asked.

"Ugh,” said the Indian. He rummaged and
produced a small bow and six arrows with
rubber knobs for heads.

“Are you a real Indian?” the boy asked.

THE RELUCTANT SHAMAN 91

“Ugh. Sure. Heap big chief.”

“Where are your feathers?”

“Put away. Only wear um for war-dance.”
The tourist paid and started out. At that
instant a copper-colored boy of fifteen years
entered from the back,

“Hey, Pop, one of the kittens just et the
other!” he called loudly.

The Indian lost his barbaric impassive-
ness. “What? Jeepers Cripus, what kind of
mink farmers do you call yourself? I told
you to shift ’em to separate cages yesterday,
before they began to fight!”

“I’m sorry, Pop. I guess I forgot.”
“You’d better be sorry. That be good
money throwed down the sewer.”

The tourist’s car door slammed, and as the
car moved off the thin voice of the tourist’s
little boy was wafted back:

“He talks just like anybody else. He don’t
sound like a real Indian to me.”

But Virgil Hathaway, alias Chief Soaring
Turtle, was a real Indian. He was a Penob-
scot from Maine, forty-six years old, a high-
school graduate, and, except that he did not
bathe as often as some people thought he
should, a model citizen.

Shortly after the departure of the tourist,
another man came in. This visitor had Hatha-
way’s distinctive muddy coloring and Mon-
goloid features, though he was fatter, shorter,
and older than Hathaway.

“Morning,” he said. “You’re Virgil Hatha-
way, ain’tcha?”

“That’s who I be, mister.”

The man smiled so that his eyes disap-
peared in fat. “Pleased to know you, Mr.
Hathaway. I’m Charlie Catfish, of the Sene-
cas.”

“That so? Glad to know you, Mr. Catfish.
How about stopping over for some grub?”
“Thanks, but the folks want to make Blue
Mountain Lake for lunch. Tell you what you
can do. I got eight stone -throwers with me.
They was let come up here providing they
behaved. I got enough to do without drag-
ging them all over, so if you don’t mind I’ll
leave ’em in your charge.”

“Stone-throwers?” repeated Hathaway
blankly.

“You know, Gahunga. You can handle ’em
even though you’re Algonquin, being as
you’re a descendant of Dekanawida,”

“I be what?”

“A descendant of Hiawatha’s partner. We
keep track — ” A horn blast interrupted him.
“Sorry, Mr, Hathaway, gotta go. You won’t

have no trouble.” And the fat Indian was
gone.

H ATHAWAY was left puzzled and un-
easy. It was nice to be descended from
Dekanawida, the great Huron chief and co-
founder of the Iroquois League. But what
were Gahuntja? His smattering of the Iro-
quoian dialects included no such term.

Then there was another customer, and after
her Harvey Pringle lounged in wearing a
sport shirt that showed off his strength and
beauty.

“Hi, Virgil,” he drawled. “How’s every
little thing?”

“Pretty good, considering.” Hathaway felt
a sudden urge to bring his accounts up to
date. Young Pringle could waste more time
in one hour than most men could in three.
“I finished my ragweed pulling for today.”
“Huh?” said Hathaway.

“Yeah. The old man got shirty again about
my not doing anything. I said, why take a
job away from some poor guy that needs it?
So I appointed myself the county’s one-man
ragweed committee. I pull the stuff up for
one hour a day, heh-heh! Babs been in?”
“No,” replied Hathaway.

“Oh, well, she knows where to find me.”
Harvey Pringle yawned and sauntered out.
Hathaway wondered what Barbara Scott
could see in that useless hulk. Then he lis-
tened to the noise.

It was like a quick, faint drumming, queer -
ly muffled, as though the drum were half full
of water. Hathaway looked out the screen-
door; no parade. Timothy-weeds nodded
peacefully in the breeze, and from the Moose
River came the faint scream of old man
Pringle’s sawmill.

The noise seemed to be behind Hathaway,
in the shop, like the sound of a small Delco
plant in the cellar. The noise increased. It
waxed, and eight figures materialized on the
rug. They looked like Iroquois warriors two
feet tall, complete with moccasins, buckskin
leggings, and scalps shaven except for stiff
crests on the crown. One squatted and tapped
a three-inch drum. The other seven circled
around him, occasionally giving the loon-cry
by slapping the hand against the mouth while
uttering a long shrill yell.

“Hey!” barked Hathaway. The drumming
stopped. “Who the devil be you?”

The drummer spoke:

“Adenlozlakstengen agoiyo — ”

“Whoa! Don’t you speak English?”

92 THRILLING WONDER STORIES

“Ayuh, mister. I though if you was a
medieine-man, you’d talk Iroquois — ”

“If I was what?”

“Medicine-man. Charlie said he was gonna
leave us with one while he went to Canada.”
“Be you the stone-throwers?”

“Ayuh. I’m chief, name of Gaga, from
Cattaraugus County. Anything you want us
to do?”

“Yeah. Just disappear for a while.” The
Gahunga disappeared. Hathaway thought
that Charlie Catfish had played a dirty trick
on him, to spring these aboriginal spooks
without explanation.

He brightened when Barbara Scott entered,
trim, dark, and energetic. Hathaway ap-
proved of energy in other people.

“Have you seen Harvey, Virgil?” she asked.
“I had a lunch date with him.”

“Uh-huh,” said Hathaway. “Prob’ly sleep-
ing on somebody’s lawn.”

Miss Scott stiffened. “You’re as bad as the
rest, Virgil. Nobody’s fair to poor Harvey.”
“Forget it,” said Hathaway with a help-
less motion of his hands. When a girl toward
whom you felt a fatherly affection seemed
bent on marrying the worthless son of the
town’s leading businessman, who was also
your landlord, there wasn’t much a moderate
man could do. “You still be having that
seance tomorrow night?”

“Yep. Dan Pringle’s coming.”

“What? He swears you’re a fake.”

“I know, but maybe I can win him over.”
“Look here, Babs, why does a nice girl like
you do all this phony spook business?”
“Money, that’s why. Being a secretary and
notary won’t get me through my last year of
college. As for being phony, how about that
ug-wug dialect you use on the tourists?”
“That be different.”

“Oh, that be different, be it? Here’s Har-
vey now; so long.”

The eight Gahunga reappeared.

“What you want us to do for you, mister?”
asked Gaga. “Charlie told us to be helpful,
and by luskeha, we’re gonna be.”

“Don’t exactly know,” Hathaway cautious-
ly replied.

“Is there anything you want?”

“Well,” said Hathaway, “I got a good
breeding female mink I wish somebody’d
offer me five hundred bucks for.”

T HE Gahunga muttered together.

“I’m afraid we can’t do anything about
that,” Gaga said finally. “Anything else?”

“Well, I wish more customers would come
in to buy my Indian junk.”

“Whoopee! U-u-u-u!” shrilled Gaga,
drumming. “Come on!”

The seven pranced and stamped for a few
seconds, then vanished. Hathaway uneasily
waited on a customer, wondering what the
Gahunga were up to.

Earl Delacroix, owner of The Pines Tea-
Shoppe. was passing on the other side of the
street, when he leaped and yelled. He came
down rubbing his shoulder and looking about
resentfully. As soon as he started to walk,
there was a flat spat of a high-speed pebble
striking his clothes, and he jumped again.
Spat! Spat! The bombardment continued un-
til he hurled himself into Chief Soaring Tur-
tle’s shop.

“Somebody’s shooting me with an air-
rifle!” he gasped.

“Bad business,” agreed Hathaway.

There was another yell, and Hathaway
looked out. Leon Buttolf was being driven
inexorably down the street to the shop. As
soon as he was inside, the bombardment
overtook Mrs. Camaret, wife of a worker in
Pringle’s mill.

By the time she had been herded in, the
streets were deserted.

“Somebody ought to go to jail for this,”
Buttolf said.

“That’s right,” said Delacroix. He looked
keenly at Hathaway. “Wonder how every-
body gets chased in here?”

“If I sink you have somesing to do wiz zis,
Virgil, I tell my Jean.” Mrs. Camaret said,
“He come, beat you up. stomp you into a
leetle jelly!”

“Jeepers Cripus!” protested Hathaway.
“How should I make a BB shot fly out in a
circle to hit a man on the far side? And my
boy Calvin’s out back with the mink. You
can go look.”

“Aw, we ain’t suspecting you,” said Buttolf.

“I’ll walk with you wherever you be going,
and take my chances of getting hit,” Hatha-
way said.

“Fair enough,” said Delacroix. So the four
went out and walked down the street a way.
Delacroix turned into his restaurant, and the
others went about their business. Hathaway
hurried back to his shop just as a pebble hit
Wallace Downey in the seat of the pants.

“Gaga!” Hathaway yelled in desperation.
“Stop it, blast your hide!” The bombardment
ceased. Downey walked off with a look of
deep suspicion. When Hathaway entered his

THE RELUCTANT SHAMAN 93

shop, the Gahunga were sitting on the coun-
ter.

Gaga grinned infuriatingly.

“We help you, huh, mister?” he said.
“Want some more customers?”

“No!” shouted Hathaway. “I don’t want
your help. I hope I shan’t ever see you
again!”

The imps exchanged startled glances. Gaga
stood up.

“You don’t want to be our boss no more?”

“No! I only want you to leave me alone!”

Gaga drew himself to his full twenty -five
inches and folded his arms.

“Okay. We help somebody who appreciates
us. Don’t like Algonquins anyway.” He
drummed, and the other seven Gahunga did
a solemn dance down the counter, disappear-
ing as they came to the pile of miniature
birch-bark canoes.

In a few minutes Hathaway’s relief was re-
placed by a faint unease. Perhaps he had
been hasty in dismissing the creatures; they
had dangerous potentialities.

“Gaga!”

Nothing happened. Calvin Hathaway put
in his head.

“Did you call me, Pop?”

“No. Yes I did. Ask your maw when din-
ner’s gonna be ready.”

It had been a mistake; what would he tell
Catfish?

After dinner Hathaway left his wife in
charge of the shop while he went for a walk
to think. In front of Tate’s hardware store
he found a noisy group consisting of old man
Tate, Wallace Downey, and a state trooper.
Tate’s window was broken, and he was ac-
cusing Downey of breaking it and stealing a
fishing-rod. Downey accused Tate of throw-
ing the rod at him through the window. Each
produced witnesses.

“I was buying some film for my camera in
the store when bingo! away goes the winda,”
a witness said. “Mr. Tate and me, we look
around, and we see Wally making off with
the rod.”

“Did you see Downey inside the window?”
asked the trooper.

“No, but it stands to reason — ”

“What’s your story?” the trooper inter-
rupted him, as he turned inquiringly at
Downey.

“I was sitting on the steps of the bank hav-
in’ a chaw, when Wally comes along carrying
that reel, and zowie! out comes the rod
through the winda, with busted glass all over

the place. If old man Tate didn’t throw it at
him somebody musta.”

P UZZLED, the trooper scratched his head.

Finally, since Tate had his rod back and
the window was insured, he persuaded the
two angry men to drop the matter.

“Hello, Virgil,” said Downey. “Why does
everything screwy have to happen in this
town? Say, do you know anything about
those BB shot? You yelled something, and
they quit.”

“I don’t know nahthing,” said Hathaway
innocently. “Some kid with an air-rifle, I
suppose. What was all this run-in with
Tate?”

“I went down to the river to fish,” ex-
plained Downey. “I had a new tackle, and I
no sooner dropped it off the bridge than I
got a strike that busted the rod right off
short. Musta been the biggest loss in the
river. Well, I saved the reel, and I was bring-
in’ it back home when old man Tate shies a
new rod at me, right through his window.”
Hathaway could see how the Gahunga were
responsible for these events ; they were being
“helpful.” He left Downey and sauntered
down Main Street, passing the Adirondack
Association office. Barbara Scott made a face
at him through the glass. Hathaway thought
she needed to be spanked, either on account
of the seances, or her infatuation with Har-
vey Pringle, or both.

Returning to his shop, the middle-aged In-
dian noted that the Gahato Garage seemed to
have an unusually brisk trade in the repair
of tires. The cars included the trooper’s Ford
with all four tires flat. Bill Bugby and his
mechanics were working on tires like mani-
acs.

The trooper who had handled the Tate-
Downey incident was walking about the
street, now and then stooping to pick up
something. Presently he came back.

“Hey, Bill!” he shouted, and conferred in
low tones with Bugby, who presently raised
his voice. “You’re crazy, Mark!” he cried.
“I ain’t never done a thing like that in all the
years I been here!”

“Maybe so,” said the trooper. “But you got
to admit that somebody scattered bright new
nails all over this street. And if you didn’t,
who did?”

Hathaway prudently withdrew. He knew
who had scattered the nails.

*****

Newcomb, the game warden, lounged into

94 THRILLING WONDER STORIES

Chief Soaring Turtle’s shop and spread his
elbows along a counter, Hathaway asked him
what he was looking so sad about.

The warden explained.

“I was walking by the bank this afternoon,
when a big car drives up and a young man
gets out and goes in the bank,” he said.
“There was a canvas bundle on the back of
the car. I didn’t think anything of it, only
just as I get past it the canvas comes tearing
off the bundle, like somebody is pulling it,
and there on the bumper is tied a fresh-killed
fawn.”

“You don’t say so?”

“Three months out of season, and no more
horns than a pussy-cat. Well, you know and
I know there’s some of that all the time. I
run ’em in when I catch ’em, and if it makes
me unpopular that’s part of my job. But
when this young man comes out and I ask
him about it, he admits it — and then it turns
out he’s Judge Dusenberry’s son. Half the
village is looking on, so I got to run young
Dusenberry in.”

“Will that get you into trouble?”

“Don’t know; depends on who wins the
election next fall. Now, Virgil, I’m not super-
stitious myself. But some of these people are,
especially the Canucks. There’s talk of your
putting a hoodoo on the town. Some have
had rocks thrown at ’em, or something, and
Wallace Downey is saying you stopped them.
If you can stop it, why can’t you start it?”

"I don’t know a thing about it,” said Hath-
away.

“Of course, you don’t — I realize that’s all
nonsense. But I thought you ought to know
what folks are saying.” And Newcomb
slouched out, leaving behind him a much
worried Indian.

The next day, Hathaway left his wife in
charge of the shop and drove towards Utica.
As he was turning onto the state highway,
Barbara Scott walked past and called good-
morning. He leaned out.

“Hi, Barbara! Be you still going to have
your spook-hunt?”

“You bet, Chief Wart-on-the-Nose.”

“What’ll you do if old man Pringle gets
up and denounces you as a fake?”

“I don’t tell my victims I’m not a fake. I
say they can watch and judge for themselves.
You don’t believe in spirits, do you?”

"Never did. Until a little while ago, that
is.”

“What the devil do you mean by that crack,

nirftr

“Oh, just some funny things that hap-
pened.”

B ARBARA tactfully refrained from
pressing for details.

“I never did either, but lately I’ve had a
feeling I was being followed,” she said. “And
this morning I found this on my dresser.”
She held out a slip of paper on which was
scrawled:

“Don’t you worry none about Daniel Prin-
gel that old sower-puss. We will help you
against him — G.

“I got an idea who sent this, but it won’t
do no good to explain now,” Hathaway
mused. “Only I’d like to see you before your
seance. G'bv.”

Three hours later Hathaway gave up his
search through the stacks of the Utica Public
Library, having gone through every volume
on anthropology, folklore, and allied subjects.
He had learned that the stone-throwers be-
longed to the genus of sprite known to the
Iroquois as Dzhungeun. They all lived in the
southwest part of the state, and comprised the
stone-throwing Gahunga, the fertility-pro-
ducing Gendayah, and the hunting and bur-
rowing Ohdowa. But although it was inti-
mated in several places that the Iroquois
shamans had known how to control ’ these
spirits, nowhere did it tell how.

Hathaway thought a while. Then he left
the library and walked along Genesee street
to a pay telephone. He grunted with pain
when he learned the cost of a call to the
vicinity of Buffalo, but it couldn't be helped.
He resolved, if he ever caught up with Char-
lie Catfish, to take the money either out of
the Seneca’s pocket or out of his hide.

“Give me the Tonawanda Reservation,” he
said.

When he got the reservation, he asked for
Charlie Catfish. After a long wait, during
which he had to feed the coin-box he was
told that Catfish wouldn’t be back for weeks.
“Then give me Chief Cornplanter.”
Another pause. Then: “He’s gone to Buf-
falo for the day.”

“Listen,” said Hathaway. “Have you got
any medicine-men, hexers. spook-mediums,
or such people among you?”

“Who wants to know?”

“I be Virgil Hathaway, of the Penobscots,
member of the Tutle clan and descendant of
Dekanawida.” He explained his difficulties.
The voice said to wait; presently an aged
voice speaking badly broken English came

THE RELUCTANT SHAMAN 95

from the receiver.

“Wait, please,” said Hathaway. “I got to
get me a pencil. My Seneca ain’t so hot. . .
*****

When Hathaway was driving back to Ga-
hato, he attempted to pass a truck on one of
the narrow bridges over the Moose River
at McKeever. The truck driver misjudged
his clearance, and Hathaway’s car stopped
with a rending crunch, wedged between the
truck and the bridge girders. When the ga-
rage people got the vehicles untangled and
towed to the garage, Hathaway learned that
he faced a four-hour twenty-dollar repair
job before he could start moving again, let
alone have his fenders straightened. And the
afternoon train north had just left McKeever.

That evening Barbara Scott had collected
the elite of Gahato for her seance: Doc Le-
noir and his wife; Levi Macdonald; the bank
cashier, and his better half; and the Pringles,
father and son, and a couple of other persons.
Dan Pringle greeted Barbara with a polite
but cynical smile. He was plump and
wheezed, and had seldom been worsted in a
deal.

Barbara sat her guests in a circle in semi-
darkness to await the arrival of her “influ-
ences.” When Harvey Pringle had fallen
asleep, she got out her paraphernalia. She
sat on a chair in the cabinet, a thing like a
curtained telephone-booth, and directed the
men to tie her securely to the chair. Then
she told them to drop the curtain and put out
the lights, and warned them not to risk her
health by turning on the lights without au-
thorization. It was not an absolutely neces-
sary warning, as she could control the lights
herself by a switch inside the cabinet.

On the table between the cabinet and the
sitters were a dinner-bell, a trumpet, and a
slate. The chair on which Barbara sat came
apart easily. Concealed in the cabinet was a
quantity of absorbent cotton for ectoplasm.
There was also a long-handled grasping de-
vice by which grocery clerks pick things off
high shelves; it was painted black. Her own
contribution to the techniques of this vener-
able racket was a system of small lights
which would warn her if any of the sitters
left his chair.

S OON Barbara gave the right kind of
squirm, and the trick chair came apart.
The loose bonds could now be removed. Bar-
bara moaned to cover the sounds of her prep-
arations, and chanted a few lines from the

Iliad in Greek. She intended to have Socrates
as one of her controls this time.

She was still peeling rope when she was
astonished to hear the dinner-bell ring. It
wasn’t a little ting such as would be made
by someone’s accidentally touching it, but a
belligerent clangor, such as would be made
by a cook calling mile- away farm-hands.
The little signal-lights showed all the sitters
to be in their seats. The bell rang this way
and that, and the trumpet began to toot.

Barbara Scott had been seancing for sev-
eral years, and had come to look upon dark-
ness as a friend, but now childish fears
swarmed out of her. The cabinet began to
rock. She screamed. The cabinet rocked more
violently. The door of the false side flew
open; the cotton and the grasper were
snatched out. The curtain billowed. The
table began to rock too. From the darkness
came an angry roar as the grasper tweaked
Doc Lenoir’s nose.

From somewhere came the muffled beat of
a drum, and a long ululating loon-cry:

“U-u-u-u-u-u-u-u!”

The cabinet tipped over against the table,
Barbara fought herself out of the wreckage.
She remembered that her private light-
switch was in series with the room’s main
switch, so that the lights could not be turned
on until the secret switch had been thrown.
She felt for it, pushed it, and struggled out
of the remains of the cabinet.

The terrified sitters were blinded by the
lights, and dumb at the spectacle of the medi-
um swathed in loose coils of rope with her
hand on the switch, her dress torn, and the
beginnings of a black eye. Next they ob-
served that the bell, slate, grasper, and other
objects were swooping about the room under
their own power.

When the lights came on, there was a yell
and a command in an unknown language.
The slate smashed down on Dan Pringle’s
head. While he stood blinking, glasses dan-
gling from one ear and the frame of the slate
around his neck, other articles went sailing
at him. He stumbled over his overturned
chair and bolted for the door. The articles
followed.

When Pringle reached the street, pebbles
began picking themselves up and throwing
themselves after the mill-owner. It took
about three tries to get his range. Then a
pebble no bigger than the end of your thumb,
tavelling with air-rifle speed, hit the back
of his thigh with a flat spat. Pringle yelled.

96 THRILLING WONDER STORIES

staggered, and kept running. Another glanced
off his scalp, drawing blood and making him
see stars.

The inhabitants of Gahato were enter-
tained by the unprecedented sight of their
leading businessman panting down the main
street and turning purple with effort. Every
now and then there would be the sound of a
pebble striking. Pringle would make a buck-
ing jump and come down running harder
than ever.

His eye caught a glimpse of Virgil Hatha-
way letting himself into his shop, and a faint
memory of silly talk about the Indian’s super-
natural powers stirred his mind. He banked
and galloped up the porch steps of Soaring
Turtle’s establishment just as Hathaway
closed the screen door behind him. Pringle
went through the door without bothering to
reopen it.

“Jeepers Cripus!” exclaimed Hathaway
mildly. “What be the matter, Dan?”

“L-l-isten, Virgil! Are you a medicine-
man?”

“Aw, don’t pay no attention to superstitious
talk like that — ”

“But I gotta have help! They’re after me!”
And he told all.

“Well!” said Hathaway doubtfully. “I’ll
see what I can do. But they’re Iroquois
spooks, and don’t think much of us Algon-
quins. Got some tobacco? All right, pull
down the shades.”

Hathaway took Pringle’s tobacco-pouch
and opened his shattered screen door. He
threw a pinch of tobacco into the dark, and
chanted in bad Seneca:

I give you tobacco, Dzhungeun,

Wanderers of the mountains.

You hear me and will come.

I give you tobacco.

I have done my duty towards you.

Now you must do yours.

I have finished speaking.

A LL eight Gahunga imps materialized on
the lawn. Hathaway sternly ordered
them to come inside. When they were in,
he questioned them:

“What have you little twerps been up to
now?” he asked.

Gaga squirmed.

“We was only trying to do Miss Scott a
favor,” he said. “She wants to put on a good
spook show. So we help. She don’t like this
old punkin Pringle. All right, we throw a
scare into him. We wasn’t going to hurt him
none.”

“You know you was let come up here for
your vacations only if you didn’t use your
stone-throwing powers,” Hathaway said.
“And you know what Eitsinoha does to little
imps who don’t behave.”

“Eitsinoha?” cried Gaga. “You wouldn’t
tell her!”

“Dunno, yet. You deserve it.”

“Please, mister, don’t say nothing! We
won’t throw even a sand-grain! I swear by
luskeha! Let us go, and we’ll head right back
to Cattaraugus!”

Hathaway turned to the quivering Pringle.
“Changed your mind about raising my rent,
Dan?”

“I’ll lower it! Five Dollars!”

“Ten?”

“Seven and a half!”

“Okay. Gaga, you and your boys can dis-
appear. But stick around. And don’t do
anything, understand, unless I tell you to.”
The Gahunga vanished.

Pringle recovered some of his usual self-
assurance and said:

“Thanks, Virgil! Don’t know what I’d have
done without you.”

“That’s all right, Dan. You better not say
anything about this, though. Remember, be-
ing a medicine-man is a kind of joke among
us Indians, like being the High Exalted Po-
tentate of one of those there lodges.”

“I understand. So they were doing her a
favor, huh? It would be bad enough to have
my son marry a phony medium, but I can
see where a real one would be worse. No
sale, and you can tell her I said so. And
Harvey’ll do what I say, because he has to
in order to eat.”

“But — ” said Hathaway. He wanted to de-
fend Barbara Scott; to tell Pringle that even
if she was a crooked medium in a mild way,
she was still better than that no-count son
of his.

“What?” said Pringle.

“Nahthing.” Hathaway reconsidered; ev-
erything was working out fine. Barbara
would get over her crush on that big loafer,
finish her college, and be able to drop the
medium racket. Why stir things up? “Good-
night, Dan.”

He hadn’t done badly, thought Hathaway
as he locked up, considering that he’d only
been in the medicine-man business a couple
of days. He must take a trip out to Tona-
wanda in the fall,- and look up Charlie Cat-
fish. Maybe the thing had commercial pos-
sibilities.

THE HEADER STEAKS

(Continued

and unscrupulous operators.

Second on the list is THE BIG NIGHT, by
Hudson Hastings, an interplanetary novelet
— with a difference. The author’s flair for
imaginative detail makes the sorry predica-
ment of the spaceship La Cucaracha, battling
the competition of space transmission, come
to life in impressive fashion. This is one of
the finest novelets of the spaceways we’ve
ever seen — and you’ll think so too, when you
read it.

And finally, the new and brilliant William
Fitzgerald contributes the second in his ser-
ies about Bud Gregory, the illiterate wizard
of the Great Smokies, THE NAMELESS
SOMETHING. This story picks up where the
first left off, with Bud in flight from official-
dom after the near catastrophe that followed
his inadvertent creation of an unshielded
atomic pile.

Murphy, the Government scientist, is af-
ter him, since the country is threatened with
war and Gregory is the one man who can
possibly save our cities from the fate of Hiro-
shima and Nagasaki. He finds Gregory ul-
timately — but finds him in such a desperate
predicament that the odds are a thousand to
one against either of them escaping a ridicu-
lous but none the less deadly fate. A grand
story by a grand new author.

And then, of course, there will be short
stories and THE STORY BEHIND THE
STORY and, of course, your speaker-back at
the reader who speaks. The J une TWS should
be a memorable issue.

LETTERS FROM READERS

TP HE plea for something besides mere criti-
cism from reader-epistolers seems to be
bearing fruit of a sort. But whether the re-
sulting collection of anagrams, conundrums
et cetera is the sort of thing we are after is a
matter for you readers to decide. At any rate,
here we go, into the wide blues hither. . . .

DERBYSHIRE AND CHESTERFIELD

By Thornes E. McCourt

Congratulations on your decision to “grow up." When,
last year, I was fortunate enough to get a subscrip-
tion to TWS I was disgusted at the amount of childidi
drivel printed in THE READER SPEAKS section.
However, now a start has been made, perhaps we may
once again see the old mag. take its rightful place
amongst the leaders of this type of fiction.

Could you clean up the illustrations next? I’m
no prude, I hope, but it does seem a little unnecessary
to drag in Ed least one scantily clothed female per
story. Also a plea for better stories. If you mean
to break with the old childish policy, let's have stor-
ies to suit. You do get an occasional good yam
printed, “Things Pass By” and “Dead City are two
instances, but generally speaking the standard is low.

om page 8)

In conclusion let me say that as applied pressure
seems to have caused the change for the better, isn't
it time we s-f readers did something more about it?
If this letter is published may I ask all who agree
with my point of view (if any) to write in to Sergeant
Saturn, (I repeat the name with distaste) ami tell
him what we want. If he receives enough requests
for a general all-round improvement we might get it.
What about it ? — 38 Devonshire Road, New Whittington,
Chesterfield, Derbyshire, England.

We would very much like to know what
issues of TWS Comrade McCourt is writing
about. Surely last issue with its Leinster
and Cahill novelets and the current number
with Leinster, Kuttner and Fitzgerald, to say
nothing of the improved short stories, should
be closer to his tastes.

And as for the Sarge, where is he? Be-
coming mighty hard to find and purposely
so. At any rate, we are in there pitching . . .
on everything but them undraped femmes.
We still like them that way, though for that
matter plenty of our stories appear without
same in the illustrations.

What is he beefing about anyway?

BROTHER GOOSE

By Peter Leyva

I have to agree with you and a host of other fans
that the Battle of the Trimmed Edges, aeon-long con-
flict though it is, should be relegated to the all-devour-
ing maw of the editorial waste basket.

I propose that you include upon the mag cover every
issue a legend stating defiantly, to wit: THIS MAGA-
ZINE HAS UNTRIMMED EDGES. CAVEAT EMPTOR.

The same goes for the anti-Bergey clan who every
issue wax eloquent in their epistolary denouncements
anent this modern Rembrandt’s pin-up cover gals. Per-
sonally, I kinda like his cover B. E. Ms (Bergey’s Ele-
gant Maidens).

Being that you publish magazines, not manholes, you
don’t have to worry about the covers too much.

Regarding some suggestions; howzabout a page or two
in the mag featuring a short biography on both lead-
ing and not so well known scientists, ancient, mediae-
val and modem, and a paragraph or two on their theo-
ries and good works performed.

Though some of the Ether Vibrationists may be able
to rattle off Einstein's Theory of Relativity as if it
were a Mother Goose rhyme, I confess some of us
lesser intelligentsia (like I and my alter ego) are a
rather sorry lot. Shamefacedly I submit that I can’t
square a circle, work out a formula for tempering
copper, nor do I have the slightest idea of how the
great pyramid of Khufu was built.

Being that you are trying to encourage scientific
debate or at least something different from the usual
Bergey blasts and story criticisms, I hereby, and as a
starter for a lusty tete-a-tete, cast the well-gnawed
bone of time-travel to the scientific wolves.

Some one enlighten me on the following:

If a gent, in the year of 2047, has, for instance,

ainted a house red, and our hero of 1947, hops into

is time flivver, sets his controls for 2047, and assum-
ing that he arrives at his destination, it still should be
impossible for him to actually see that red house. Why?

Well, as Plato said, nothing can be seen in its real
shape and form. All that we can see of anything is the
reflected light of the object that we look upon. Hence,
how can said red house be noted by our brave time-
traveling hero, when the light that would fall upon the
house that day is not scheduled to leave the sun in
another hundred years? By what light, then, does our
hero see anything in the time travel stories that we
read?

After all, the sun doesn’t know about our hero’s time
excursion, not having been let in on the secret . — 221
So. Victoria Ave., Atlantic City, N. J.

Well, our only suggestion in answer to your

m THRILLING WONDER STORIES

problem is that perhaps the hero wore polar-
ized sun-glasses. Any other solutions remain
welcome.

I turn each page from age to age
I read the livelong night.

My eyes grow wide, my ways gm-- T wiki.
My hair is turning white!

A PIMIENTO FROM OLIVER

By Chad Oliver

Yet still I seek . . . yet still I buy .
Yet still I read the stuff!

And, though my reason’s tottering,

I cannot get enough!

The December TWS reared its lurid head upon these
fair premises just as I was feverishly pounding away
on an English theme anent Thomas Hardy’s RETURN
OF THE NATIVE. Thus TWS will have to wait awhile
and be digested in chunks. Still, there are a couple of
points I’d like to sound off on to you personally.

First, many thanks for giving us a de Camp tale.
He is, to me, the most literate writer ever produced
by stfantasy. The fact that he usually writes in a light
vein does not alter the fact that his conclusions and
ideas are more forcefully brought home to the reader
than any other writer now dabbling in The Field. He
is, also, a simply beautiful writer.

Second — Henry Kuttner doing a Hollywood-on-the-
Moon thing next issue after such classics as CALL HIM
DEMON ! Hank seems to write great stuff effortlessly —
it is, I mean, about as easy for him to write a DARK
WORLD as a PLIGHT OF HECTOR DIDDLEBOTTOM.
So why such trivia?

Third — every pic this trip by Mad Mark. This, sir, is
a new low.

Fourth — -I love my fellow letter hacks. In the current
session, one remark by one Alan D. Jones slays me.
2t’s on page 100, directly above Chadrack. This fellow
has keen insight. The sentence: "... for a story
which was excellent without having any outstanding
parts in it.”

Lastly, I liked the book reviews and think you did
a very nice job thereon. Taine's THE TIME STREAM
was a fine novel, and SKYLARK OF SPACE wasn’t.
However, you might have mentioned the fact that Dr.
Smith has since graduated from the "gee whiz” school.
Author’s comments were interesting this trip, too — you
could almost see a brain cell or two forced reluctantly
into spasmodic activity.

I think TWS is making a real attempt to move for-
ward, and you deserve a helping hand from all stfan-
tasy lovers . — 1023 Bonham Terrace, Austin, Texas.

For certainly Horatio,

In his philosophies,

Though he had dined on cold mince p:es.
Dreamt not of things like these!

And so, dear Saturn, hear my praise.

I think your mags are swell.

I’ll bless you with my dying breath,

From out my padded cell!

— 1290 Alma Street, Beaumont . Texas.

Well, when we get one of these there is
only one thing to do. So. . . .

Though Saturn in the heavens slowly fades
And wraps his rings about him in the gloom,
Your editor his personal’ty trades
And sweeps with that proverbial new broom.

The Xeno vats lie empty in the hold.
Untended by the loving hands of yore,

The old space lingo’s covered now with mold
And Snaggle’s tooth is powdered on the floor.

Yet although Froggie’s monstrous glowing
orbs

No longer roll with interest toward the light,
And Wart-ears’ orifice no more absorbs
Spare Xeno, yet the System’s still all right,

Gee whiz, yourself, Chad — and thanks. In-
cidentally there is a bathetic something about
your close juxtaposition of Thomas Hardy
and our more or less advanced STF. Wonder
what “Old Tom” thought about such matters,
—or did he?

As for Dr. Smith’s metamorphosis, your
critic has to call the books as he sees, or
rather reads, them. And SKYLARK OF
SPACE was so bad he wonders why on earth
it was selected for binding. Nothing is more
baffling to an editor than a publisher — and
once again vice versa. They operate from
opposite poles.

PURPLE BEMS— OUR
ANAPAESTIC FOOT!

By Evangeline Brunson

Long and faithfully I’ve followed your column, hang-
ing upon your every printed word (and don’t say I
deserve to hang!). Now I find that I can maintain
silence no longer, so I’m burtsing forth in a paean of
praise which I’m optimistic enough to hope you’ll print.
Even if you head it "Verse and Worse” I’ll try to for-
give you.

T. W. S.! Great S. T. F.!

Oh, alphabetic gems!

You lead me through a nightmare world.
Pursued by purple BEMS.

I leave my home, my friends, my foes,

I push aside the stars,

That I may shudder through the hours
On Mercury or Mars.

For when not eyeing Bergey’s maidens’ stems
Your editor must still confess to a certain
lurking liking

For those impossible creatures known as
BEMS!

Which should be about enough of that,
Evangeline, unless the Cajun demands anoth-
er poetic inburst.

TAKE COUVER

By John Van Couvering

Finding myself with a copy of the December ish in
one hand, a typewriter near die other, and many
thoughts of criticism and congratulations in this poor
head, I chose the obvious course and decided to tell
you what's what in the December TWS.

The cover was exceptionally good, but then Bergey
did it, and, as you said, he can really draw! Best of
all, there wasn’t a mistake on the whole cover.

I AM EDEN was another of Kuttner’s very good fan-
tasy-STFiction stories.

THE END is the “pocket universes” in a future age,
eh? This isn’t The End of the series, is it? I really
hone not.

GRIM RENDEZVOUS. Bah! Zagat is good, yes, but
not on shorts. Keep him busy on a good novel or nov-
elet and he won't do it any more. I hope.

THE GHOSTS OF MELVIN PYE, What have we
here? De Camp? This is too good to be true! And
what a story! I don’t know if it’s fantast or STF,
and what's more I don’t care. Whoop^eec!

PHALID’S FATE was even past Vance’s previous
efforts, and that’s really good.

PARDON MY MISTAKE had a decidedly mediocre
twist, due mainly to the fact that the story was sorta
pore and sickly. Came as a surprise, anyhow. But
that's all.

Another story with a twist is LIFE ON THE SFCM5N,
but it’s infinitely better, both in style and handling.
I like that twist, too. Very neat.

The Header Speaks is filled mainly with fellows who
wouldn’t get printed otherwise except they’re too dumb
to be funny, or too smart. So you print ’em. Then
there are the guys who are funny enough to be printed
anyhow, and who can also say something. First goes
to Oliver (who else), second goes to Ron Anger, and
third goes to Sneary, who has many ideas but is a
very poor speller. Why don’t you rewrite the whole
letter while you’re at it? Thanks for printing it — he
ISN’T trying to be funny . — 902 North Downey Avenue,
Downey, California.

Well, anyway, it wasn’t in poetry.

NOT m HEAT, BUT IN ANGER

By Ron Anger

In my humble opinion you have no peer in the editor
department and I. for one, would like to know your
real name, see your picture ( real picture) etc. The fans
get a lot of enjoyment out of your writings and now
that things are on a more . . . shall we say . . . serious
plane it would not be amiss to give us your real name
at the same time keeping the Sarge title for old times’
sake.

Seeing that you don’t want us fans to tell you how
horrible the blurb laughingly called the cover is there
is only one thing left: And whereas said blurb appears
on the Dec. ish and whereas December is the last ish
of TWS to be dated 1946 it is therefor the decision of
this letter-hack to list the

Favourite Yarns of ’46 in TWS

Rocket Skin — By Ray Bradbury, short, Spring TWS.

Dead City — By Murray Leinster, novelet. Summer.

Call Him Demon — By Keith Hammond, novelet, Fall.

Phalid’s Fate — By Jack Vance, novelet, Dec.

You will have observed that I have used the some-
what arbitrary but on the whole reliable system of
naming my favourite story from each issue without
trying to rate them any finer. Other data are that no
novel made the top four and that no author had two
stories in them.

These are by no means the only fine stories you have
given us, however, and my "place” list follows:

Battle of the Brains by Jerry Shelton. Zero by Noel
Loomis, Pocket Universes by Murray Leinster and The
End by Murray Leinster.

Samuel Mines, Charles F. Ksanda, Henry Kuttner,
Arthur Leo Zagat also did excellent work for you in
'46 and there were numerous others which were prob-
ably just as deserving of mention.

It has been a good year for TWS in the story de-
partment and may they always be as good !

I have a coupla bones to pick with two of the au-
thors, however, thusly:

Murray Leinster — How come the light from the 2nd
Galaxy would reach Earth only after the collision had
taken place?

Alexander Samalman — Granting that science fiction
must adhere to scientific theory or else explain why it
deviates, there could be no liquid mud on the surface
of the Moon. — 520 Highland Avenue, Ottawa, Ontario.

Well now, isn’t that sweet! As for the ex-
Sarge giving his real name he is, believe it or
not, officially tongue-tied and for very good
reasons not to be listed here. As for his real
picture, you’ll live a longer, better, happier
life without exposure to same.

Your choice of “bests” was interesting —
especially in view of the Herculean efforts
that have been going on hereabouts for some
time to lift the level of our short stories and
novelets. Now it looks as if the longer job
needs shoring up. Oh, well. . . .

As to your “coupla bones” to pick, Leinster
seems to have fled town at this writing and
cannot be reached. And re the matter of
liquid mud on the moon, Alexander Samal-

[Turn page ]

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LIGHTS— CAMERA— AND ACTION!

By Rodney Palmer

I am sorry to see that Thrilling Wonder is going
high-class. Instead of being a first-class Pulp it has
graduated (?) into a third class slick. The editors
apparently have only a very vague idea what their
readers want.

If I were editor of a science-fiction mag, here’s what
I’d do — first I would cafi up on the carpet all the old-
line writers who’d gone literary, would tell them to
turn out professionally entertaining work — of which
they are all capable — or else. Then the big names
would be called in— -Manly Wade Wellman, Edmond
Hamilton, Joseph J. Millard, Robert Moore Williams
(what’s the matter with these boys?)

A story for my mag wouldn’t lean heavily either in
the direction of blundering action or Tired Writing. A
well written story would be one embracing a clever
plot, plenty of scientific patter — and to balance off
the patter an equal paragraph of fast action.

The best example of a good story I can bring to
mind is BATTLE OF THE BRAINS by Jerry Shelton.
There was science at its best — and plenty of action to
give a swift pace. Stories like POCKET UNIVERSES
and CALL HIM DEMON (which are no more than
thickly padded attempt at Literatoor) would be in-
stantly and forever outlawed.

In conclusion, a suggestion: Let the trend swing back
to what science-fiction lovers really want: A story
heavy with science BUT FOR EVERY PARAGRAPH
OF SCIENTIFIC PATTER AN EQUAL PARAGRAPH
OF ACTION FOR BALANCE!— 226 West 60th Street ,
Chicago 21, Illinois.

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And why not fold in a couple of whites of
egg beaten stiff and top with a dusting of
grated nutmeg. Stories are not manufactured
in drug stores, in spite of comment to the
contrary. A paragraph of this for a para-
graph of that indeed! Maybe the literate Mr.
Palmer should read Thomas Hardy instead
of Oliver. He might discover a little some-
thing about the wellsprings of human behav-
ior, to say nothing of real fiction. Next,
please. . . .

ANOTHER ANNUAL LISTING

By Warren D. Rayle

The occasion for this letter is the December TWS,
which should inspire more eloquent tongues than mine.
Typewriters may prove more difficult to inspire.

My judgment as to the merits of the issue is: I Am
Eden — Kuttner; Phalid’s Fate — Vance; good. The End
—Leinster; and The Ghosts of Melvin Pye — de Camp;
passable- I say no more.

The Story Behind the Story is a department well
worth enlarging.

The Reader Speaks is usually at least as interesting
as the stories. However, it seems that the only thing
fans write about is the magazine itself. Why not a
scholarly discussion of some science-fiction gadgets,
for a change?

I haven’t heard anyone suggest that maybe cosmic
rays are the result of space-ship drives. It could be,
for example, a highly developed betatron, or other
electron accelerator, running off atomic power, and
proceeding by the reaction of a jet of near-light-speed
electrons. I fully realize that it would have to be a
highly developed. betatron, to give a useful reaction. —
663 East 107th Street, Cleveland 8, Ohio.

We’ll do our best with TSBTS department
as suggested. But trying to get these fellers
to write extra wordage once their checks are

1 ftft

paid is like trying to extract an appendix out
of doors on a rainy night with a toothpick.

As for your cosmic ray theory, we make
no comment. Our legs are long enough now
without risking further stretching to cause
discomfort while riding atop a Fifth Avenue
bus.

ALLSTARS

By John Walsh

This letter is going to be short and to the point. First
of all, congratulations to Henry Kuttner for .his superb
story “I Am Eden.”

Year’s rating for TWS follows:

3. I Am Eden . . . Henry Kuttner.

2. Call Him Demon . . . Keith Hammond. Here was
a treat for fantasy lovers. The best of its type since
"The Devil’s Fiddle.”

3. Pocket Universes . . . Murray Leinster. The End
. . . Murray Leinster. A couple of really fine tales,
original and well -written.

4. The Multillionth Chance . . . John Russell Feam.
Though not as good as “Aftermath,” this was still an
interesting and capable work.

5. Dead City . . . Murray Leinster. Again ML comes
through — with one of the best Time Travel Tales I’ve
read. Much more Murray.

The art department was enlivened by Finlay and
Stevens and by Marchioni, in a negative sense of
course. The Reader Speaks was vastly improved by
the exclusion of space dialect. All in all, a fair year
which improved toward the end. But as far as stories
go, you didn’t approach last year’s “Swnrd of To-
morrow.”

And now I’ve got an idea that should start some
discussions in TWS. Let’s have every fan write in
his ten favorite stf yams, with appropriate comments.
I’ll start the ball rolling with mine.

1. Ark of Fire, by John Hawkins. For sheer, stirring
power and great characterization, this is my favorite
of them all.

2. World of A, by A. E. Van Vogt. Science- fiction has
produced few finer tales than this one of a befuddled
superman in a world of logic. I haven’t read “Sian!”,
but . . .

3. The Ship of Ishtar, by A. Merritt. Try as I might,
I couldn’t keep this, my favorite fantasy, off this list.

4. The Skylark of Space, by E. E. Smith. Despite
nauseous dialogue, the famous "Skylark” is my king
of interplaneties.

5. The Impossible World, by Eando Binder. This
tremendous story of aliens appeared ’way back in
Startling’s second issue. Those were the days . . .

6. Rebirth, by Thomas C. McClarv.

7. Before the Dawn, by John Taine. Here is stf that
IS stf!

8. A Martian Odyssey, by Stanley G. Weinbaum.
’Nufif said.

9. The Shadow out of Time, by H. P. Lovecraft.
There was only one Lovecraft, there’ll never be another.

10. Universe, by Robert Heinlein.

I see that with every word I write, I’m contradicting
the first line of this letter so I’d better quit . — 154 North
Main Street, St. Albans, Vermont.

No beefs, John, except on the aforemen-
tioned SKYLARK OF SPACE. On which,
pfui!

HE AIN’T EDEN

By Norm Storer

Cover: rather nice. The dark sky is a change, at
least, and even Bergey’s babe seems to be in better
health and wardrobe this ish.

Stories: top place, of course, goes to Leinster’s
"END.” Really swell. As good as the superb “DEAD
CITY,” if not better.

Kuttner is not far behind with his “I AM EDEN.”
Sounds like a re-hash of the recent SS novel, ‘VALLEY
OF THE FLAME,” but a good deal better.

[Turn page ]

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The rest of the stories are not classics by any matter
of means, but neither are they half bad. I guess de
Camp's “GHOST” leads them, with all the rest fol-
lowing in no particular order.

A special word of praise for Vance. In his second
(am I right in that?) STF story, he has certainly out-
done his “WORLD-THINKER.” More of his work will
be appreciated.

Pics: ouch! Having all of the mag illustrated by
Marchioni isn’t my idea of the best way to sell it.
Where is that Stevens man?

Letters: Ah Chad, (or did I say that before?) You
are divine. Practically. All that plug for “friend
Norman Storer” will not go unheeded. The rest of the
letters are all good. Put me down fellers, don’t be so
affectionate.

One more little word and I'm on my way. I was
sorry at first to hear of Ye Sarge’s arrival on the
wagon, but as time goes on. I see some of the ol'
humor still in there, so I don’t feel too bad. — 2724 Miss.
Street, Lawrence, Kansas.

Who’s this Sarge you speak of in such
familiar fashion? A non-commissioned BEM,
maybe?

ON TRIAL IN MONTREAL

By George F. White

Your article on space travel and its implications was
extremely interesting and I hope you give us more of
the same sometime in the near future. I heartily agree
with your suggestion that the letters from fans should
contain something more than just story ratings. Dis-
cussions and arguments between fans on scientific sub-
jects and other matters pertaining to Science Fiction
would prove to be very interesting.

On the whole the December issue was below par
with the two novelets outrating everything else. They
were excellent: however here is my rating of the issue.

I AM EDEN, an excellent piece of work for those
who like this type of story.

PHALID’S FATE, very good: the transplanting of
someone's brain has always interested me. The de-
scription of Wratch’s reactions to the impressions of
an alien body was well done.

THE END, Leinster’s sequel to Pocket Universes is
excellent. His handling of the expanding universe
theory is impressive. Murray Leinster seems very well
informed on matters pertaining to astronomy and
physics and he is consistently the best in my estima-
tion.

As for the short stories they are not worth mention-
ing. Why the ghost story in a S.F. magazine. Sarge?

Earle Bergey is a top notch artist: his technique is
excellent, and his girls put him in a class with Varga
and Petty. Earle’s conception of a space ship is poor.
His craft are usually too cluttered up with unnecessary
fins, tubes, windows, etc. A space ship is essentially
a projectile so let it remain as such. — 7922 St. Gerard
Street, Montreal 10, P. Q.

Well, Bergey will be elated about this. And
after all, every man is entitled to his own
view of space ships until he is confronted
with the real thing. What you hear boiling is
our short story writers.

THIS ONE IS SILLY

By Edwin Sigler

Well, if you want us to talk about something other
than the stories you print, I will oblige. In the stories
you have published the space ships do all their fighting
with ray cannon.

I hold that we would not have to devise a single
new weapon to enable a ship to protect itself from
pirates or any other hostile ship. The only serious
problem would be the recoil and that has been done
away with as a direct result of this last war.

Let us assume that two ships meet in open space,
one a pirate vessel, the other an American destroyer
— the spatial equivalent of an earthly tin-can as they
are sometimes called.

102

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Radar will pick up the pirate vessel at perhaps a
hundred miles and they swing around in pursuit.
J§ince it is unlikely that the pirate craft could escape
they are forced to join battle.

Closing in, the destroyer opens fire at perhaps fifty
miles. Using the fire-control developed for the big
Boeing bombers, the gunners swing their guns around
and firing out through pressure gaskets let the crim-
inals have a long drag from each of several heavy
Brownings while the ship is kieked out of the path
of any return fire. Such a salvo might last as long as
a minute and as a Browning fires at the rate of fifteen
hundred per would result in several thousand or so
armor-piercing slugs streaming across space.

Since they would leave no track in the airless void
the pirates have no way of telling where they are going
and don’t swerve out of the line of fire in time ... —
1328 North Market, Wichita , Kansas.

There was a lot more of this, but we’ve
had enough. If the pirate ship couldn’t see
the 50-calibers coming, neither could the
space destroyer see how close they were get-
ting. And would tracer burn without air. In-
cidentally, if it took a 90-millimeter shell to
pierce tank armor in 1945, how would a mere
machine-gun pierce space-ship armor? And
if. . . . But let’s stop right now. Madness lies
immediately ahead.

THAT PLACE IN KANSAS AGAIN

By Alan Jones

I see TWS has reverted to type in its covers. And
it was supposed to be cold on that old Earth, too.
Tell Bergey to find some color besides red for his male
space -suits.

Well, anyway, to get to that thing which good letter-
writers never do — rating the stories.

The End . . . About 9 jugs. It was pretty good, but
not nearly as good as “Pocket Universes.” There could

be a sequel to “The End,” too. I hope the sequel to
“The D. Circuit” is as good as the original.

Phalid’s Fate . . . Vance is darn good for a new-
comer, even good for an old hand at STF. 7 jugs.

I Am Eden . . . Just a rehash of Valley of the Flame,
but pretty good. 6 jugs.

Grim Rendezvous . . . Fair. 5 jugs. An interesting
theory in it.

The other three were just filler. About a half a
Martini apiece. Made with kerosene.

That was a good editorial, Sarge. I’m glad to see you
take a real, non-cynical view of something.

Why don’t you get Stevens or Finlay back to do your
drawing? Marchioni just can’t draw, Sarge! And you
let him do the whole dam ish, too ! — 1242 Prairie , Law-
rence, Kansas.

All male space suits are red flannel during
the winter months. That is the law, Jonesy.
Poor Marchioni. I knew him, Horatio.

MORE RATINGS

By Rex E. Ward

Before giving my personal opinion of the latest issue,
let me explain my new rating system:

A story is rated on six qualities: “narrative hook,”
originality of plot, characterization, style, description,
and the ending, in that order. Seven points for each
quality is the highest score possible. Once the total
number of points has been obtained, the sum is di-
vided by forty-two, thus giving the story’s final per-
centage. So:

(t) The Ghosts of Melvin Pye, by L. Sprague de
Camp. 6-6-6-5-5-5, percentage: .76.

(2) I Am Eden, by Henry Kuttner. 6-S-5-4-5-5, per-
centage: .71.

(3) The End, by Murray Leinster. 3-5-5-4-4-S, per-
centage: .63.

(4) Pardon My Mistake, by Fletcher Pratt. 3-2-4-6-
5-5, percentage: .58.

(5) Grim Rendezvous, by Arthur Leo Zagat. 4-4-3-S-
3-2, percentage: .50.

[Turn page]

103

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Life on the Moon and Phalid’s Fate came in with .32
and .19, respectively. The magazine averaged a .53.

And now a few well-meaning suggestions:

Drop the name “Sergeant Saturn”; in this day and
age it just doesn’t fit. A cover by Virgil Finlay, if
possible. Trim the edges. Give us a picture of Earle
Bergey; I like his work, even if a lot of other fans
don’t. And, last but not least, revive Captain Future
magazine! — 428 Main, El Segundo. California.

What a system! We personally subtract
the total of vowels from the total of conso-
nants, multiply by the syllable count of the
longest adverb and divide by 3.1416. It comes
out very close to your count, Rex.

As for your suggestions — again, who’s this
Saturn? We prefer Bergey to Finlay on cov-
ers (quiet out there!). Incidentally, Bergey
will not pose except in red flannels and he
says they itch so he won’t put them on. Okay?
Fate of the Cap is left to the Future.

BROWN STUDY

By Guerry Campbell Brown

What do you know, a good Bergey cover. “Kuttner’s
‘I am Eden’ was typically good stf. The same with
“The End,” and “Phalid’s Fate.”

The short, stories were not particularly good, except
for Samalman’s “Life on the Moon.”

And what’s this I read in the first part of TWS — ,
— all the praise and discussion about rocket travel?
Certainly, I’m interested in the future of rocket travel,
and all that, but isn’t this the same Sarge who only
a few months ago was panning the amateur rocket
societys? Or did that policy go out with the Xeno?
I hope so. — Delray Beach, Florida.

Yes, it’s the same — er — writer. But we
were panning the early issues of the society
magazine and what looked then like a very
rackety price for some. A check of recent
Fanzine Reviews in our companion magazine,
STARTLING STORIES, will reveal that we
have long since swung into the ranks of Glen
Ellyn rooters. If this is disturbing, remember
we are not a fixed star.

SHRILL SMALL VOICE

By Patti J. Bowling

According to your comment on page 100, I qyote,
“Not a letter from a femme fan in a singularly moun-
tainous pile of mail this time out.” Well, I’m a fern
. . . Ooooh what I almost said! I’m not one of Bergey’s
BEM’S, for sure. Of course, maybe you’re not to
blame on account of how I signed the letters.

Now, on to the December issue of TWS. I liked it
very, very much. I have only one criticism, that is,
MARCHIONI! !

I AM EDEN by Henry Kuttner was excellent. I’m
much interested in learning more about the characters.
How did Dr. Cairns’ or Jacklyn’s daughter finally
readjust, and did she and Ferguson fall in love, etc?
Frankly, I believe it would make a swell story to begin
where this one stops and tell all these things.

The two novelets and the four short stories were also
excellent. As for the features, good as ever if not
better. The only kick I have against TWS is the fact
that the letters are published so long after the story
actually appears.

Oh, I meant to mention THE END. I was very agree-
ably surprised when I read it. In a letter which wasn’t
published I suggested that Leinster write a sequel to
his POCKET UNIVERSES.

You, as well as a number of writers to the TWS, keep
urging that we write in about controversial matters

and start a good discussion, so here goes. I’ve read
hundreds and hundreds of stf and fantasy, etc., and the
thing that always strikes me as being unsound is the
fact that the authors never envision a change in the
psychology of human beings.

This seems completely haywire to me. Vance in his
PHALID’S FATE touched on this different psychology,
touched on, I say, not grasped. Why must all conflict
in stf revolve around greed, conquest, jealousy, all
the baser human emotions? Why not imagine that a
thousand years or more from" now every human
from birth is conditioned, psychologically, to live
ethical, logical lives for the betterment of themselves
and each other? — 137 Eads Avenue, San Antonia 4,
Texas.

You should have given us a hint as to gen-
der, Patti, before sounding off. So you want
a sequel to I AM EDEN. Well, we’ll ask,
Kuttner, but he’s pretty well tied up just
now. At least we were in there with THE
END by Leinster.

On your suggestion about improved hu-
mans to come — bravo, and by all means. But
let’s make it a hundred thousand, not a thou-
sand years, shall we? There are too many
BEMs still around, as a glimpse at any news-
paper front page will reveal. It’s going to take
a long, long time.

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It is seldom that I pick up a copy of a prozine and
enjoy it as much as I did your Dec. ish. That was,
if you ask me, just about the best ish of TWS I have
ever had the pleasure to read!

The cover was really amazing — or should I sav
"thrilling”? Imagine! The femme has (get this, now)
— not a tin bra and scan ties — but long underwear!
Gad, revolutionary, wot? And no Bern — except one
clutching in the air. Tell me, Sarge, why must the
hero always have on a red football uniform and brown
shoulder pads and red hair? Is that the convential
stef hero, or is that what The Great Bergey looks like?

1 Am Eden by Hank Kuttner is one of the best yarns
I’ve read all year! Even better than Sword and Dark
World.

Phalid’s Fate cops first place in the shorts this time.
Very, very good. Reminded me slightly of Dr. Smith’s
Grey Lensman.

Grim Rendezvous and The End are next. Both were

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super (to coin a phrase). Leinster developed his "pock-
et universe” idea excellently, although I still don’t get
it . . .

The other shorts were all good. De Camp’s and
Samalman’s little hunks o’ humor were duly appre-
ciated by yours truly. Some fans will undoubtedly
jump on" you for that de Camp short but not me . . .

THE READER BABBLES was pretty good this time —
B65 — 20th Ave. So., St. Petersburg, 6, Florida.

There is a rumor afloat that Bergey’s moth-
er was frightened by the underwear color sec-
tion of an old-fashioned Sears Roebuck cata-
logue. Hmmm — could be.

PANNED FROM ONTARIO

By Kenneth M. Smookler

Not. to mince words I would like to open with the
most usual item in a fan letter — panning.

To begin with, the short stories included two me-
diocre, but not too bad, numbers— namely, "Pardon My
Mistake,” and "Life on the Moon.” The first of these,
by the way, illustrates a common error which keeps
many science-fiction stories from being classed among
the great; that is, taking a common, rather trite non-stf

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plot and then twisting stf to fit the plot rather than
the other way round.

In trying to classify the novelets and place one above
the other I find myself blocked. “The End” was, of
course, more of an original plot, but “Phalid’s Fate”
took a not-yet-hackneyed plot and treated so well of
detail that it ranks with “The End.”

The novel was good though a bit too much fantasy
for my tastes. Kuttner seems to delight in hovering
just on the edge of fantasy while seeming to be a
modernistic author. “Sword of Tomorrow” impressed
me as being the same sort of semi-stf, semi-fantasy
novel. Kuttner is good but I think he should either
write stf or write for a fantasy mag.

Stf stories have been written which mention the
existence on various other solar system planets of
material life (as opposed to pure-energy life-forms).
My argument is that it is impossible on all planets but
Mars, Earth, and Venus. If anyone feels disposed to
accept my flung gauntlet I have some answers to al-
most any arguments against my pet theory . — 1445 Vic-
toria Avenue, Windsor, Ontario.

Let’s step into another Solar System, if you
please, and see what turns up. Maybe Ber-
gey isn’t so far from the mark at that.

NOTE FROM A VETERAN READER

By George Ford Jr.

My first and probably my last letter as a science -fic-
tion fan — but the “Reader Speaks” seems to be your
most popular feature, so here goes nothing.

I know the fatal tendency of old time fans to com-
pare present science fiction with that of the “good old
days,” usually to the detriment of our current crop of
stories, and I would like to avoid that pitfall. But in
all truth — they have a point at that. After re-reading
some of the stuff turned out in the said “good old
days” will have to admit the authors waited till they
had something to write about, and then did their best
to turn out a good readable, logical story. Nowadays
they seem to be more concerned with turning out the
“mostest” production with the “leastest” effort — men-
tally that is — and as a consequence we have enough
pot-boilers to equip a Salvation Army soup kitchen.

In your present issue I found one good story. “The
End” by Murray Leinster. I believe he did a much
better job than Henry Kuttner with his “I Am Eden.”
The latter plot, if you can call it that, might have been
better sold to one of the comic magazines. I refuse to
believe that the I.Q. of the average science -fiction fan
is that of a 6 year old . — 1595 Spruce St., Denver , Colo.

After trying to dig out enough old-timers
to keep the STARTLING STORIES Hall of
Fame alive, your reporter must enter a hearty
dissent as to the STF of fifteen-twenty years
ago. Here and there, of course, are classics
or semi-classics that have stood up under
the test of time and changing fashions.

But they are no more frequent in STF than
in any other story form — perhaps less so, due
to low prices paid authors in comparison to
other types of. fiction and so on. Here and
there classics and near-classics are still being
produced — even, occasionally in TWS and SS.
The only test is time, and most of the oldies
are moldies.

NEOPHYTE

By Lois Kraus

I haven’t been reading TWS very long, but I’m be-
ginning to wonder if girls are prohibited in your col-
umn. I just finished reading your December issue,
which for once has a cover I don’t stick in my pocket
lest I be arrested.

Tills issue is terrif, but def! That is all except I

106

AM EDEN. When I finished reading that all I could
say was — SO WHAT ? — 7233 Tapper Avenue, Hamond,
Indiana.

That’s dif, Lois, but def yourself. Incident-
ally, this lopping-off of words brought into
prominence by the bar gal in the movie ver-
sion of THE LOST WEEKEND is not new.
It was nicely satirized back in 1926 or 1927 by
a song entitled A SUNNY DISPOSISH in the
Broadway revue AMERICANA. Somebody
ought to dig it up as it said it all.

FASTER THAN LIGHT

By Wallace Weber

Having finished off all the stories in the December
issue of TWS, (that’s a swell spaceship on the cover)
I have concluded that Murray Leinster almost rivals
Chad Oliver as far as writing ability is concerned. I
got a bang out of “Life on the Moon” although I didn’t
care for the way the author wrote it.

Say, Sarge, I got me a problem. There has been an
ugly rumor buzzing around that nothing can go faster
than light. Now if you know anyone who believes it,
ask him to explain to me what happens in the fol-
lowing situation.

Planet A is heading for planet B at the rather speedy
velocity of V 2 light speed. (To simplify things, I am
considering planet B stationary.) A Xeno-powered
spaceship, S, can attain a velocity of % light speed.
Nov/ what I want to know is, what happens to the
spaceship if it takes off! from planet A bound for planet
B? If it goes % light speed in the same direction the
planet is going, the ship is tearing along at 1*4 light
speeds in relation to planet B. If you can get me an

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answer to my problem, I’ll smuggle a jug of that
rocket fuel into your cage. — Box 585, Ritzville, Wash-
ington.

No rocket fuel for us, Wallace. Maybe some
of you wizards in the audience can handle
this one We’re too tired — and too dumb.

BERGEY REPLACES BEMS

By Ron Garth

I swam through the December TWS from cover to
cover and here is my last will and testament. To:

THE END I leave — 10,000,000 credits. It was good
in detail and plot but that cover (?) floored me.

PHALID'S FATE— 5,000.000 credits. Kind of weak in
the plot but the impressions were terrific.

I AM EDEN — 1,000,000 credits and a copy of Darwin’s
works. (The deluxe edition in genuine ape skin.)

LIFE ON THE MOON— 5,000 credits and my laughter.

GRIM RENDEZVOUS— One counterfeit credit and I
am not sure it is worth that.

THE GHOSTS OF MELVIN PYE— One picture of me
in a beautiful lead frame.

PARDON MY MISTAKE — He owes me something for
this!!! I’ve read better in comics.

Tell Mr. Bergey that he has replaced the Bems with
C.C.M.’s (Cat clawed monsters).

Since I have little time left I will attack the impreg-
nable things known as “The Readers.” Mr. Halibut,
I firmly believe that every first letter that has ever
been written opened with the phrase “I have broken

•ray life long pledge of never writing to ” ad

infinitum.

Thank goodness for readers such as Mr. Ralph D.
Comer. He knows what he has to say and says it
without too much goo. — 412 Cleveland Drive, Lido Key,
Sarasota, Florida.

Okay, Ron, that’s your opinion. Take it
away. . . .

MORE CANADIAN CAPERS

By Greg Cranston

Though I have read two years of TWS. this is the
first ish which has not caught, me with my typewriter
in hock. The mag is improving constantly, and has
reached, in my estimation, the top of the science-fiction
field.

Ye December Ish

Running first, and paying .82. is PHALID’S FATE,
which was good because of the comparisons of vision,
and the hero’s courage. Place, at .78, is I AM EDEN,
which is a most entertaining combination of phan-
tasy. mythology and ultra-science. Show, at .75. is
THE END. which is a fine story by a fine author, and
a sequel that demands a sequel. More of the same.

Trailing by a length is THE GHOSTS OF MELVIN
PYE, at .61. which is intriguing, and something differ-
ent. Next is GRIM RENDEZVOUS, with .50. Would
have been better if the hero had died, and the heroine
had married the general. LIFE ON THE MOON, with
.15, was hack. Last with .06. is PARDON MY MIS-
TAKE. The title was admirably appropriate.

Marchioni is improving, but does he have to do the
whole mag? The cover stunk. THE READER SPEAKS
WAS GOOD. Ye Sarge’s little prophecy was s+irring.
I have often wondered, now that ye Sarge has climbed
on the wagon, if TWS might become a chronicle of
ultra -science, with technical narratives written in alge-
bra, instead of delightful little fairy tales. Don’t do it.
— 184 Glen Road , Hamilton, Ontario.

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What’s happening in Canada? Our sister
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108

a veritable hive of fanactivity lately. Will
someone please elucidate anent same? We
shall be glad to give him space.

HOW ABOUT A CUP OF TEA?

By S. Vernon McDaniel

Since you seem to want thoughts on subjects dear
to Stf hearts, I give you these, sensible or not sensible.

It has been in my mind for a long time that space-
ships could be run on water. As all of you more or
less witty fens know. Hydrogen burns with a violent
explosion when mixed with Oxygen and Ignited. And
it is also known that water is made of two parts Hy-
drogen and one part Oxygen, which can be separated
by many methods, the simplest of which is the elec-
trolysis of water.

You know, where a cathode and an anode are stuck
into some water and Hydrogen bubbles off of one and
Oxygen off the other. Now when Hydrogen burns in
Oxygen it bums to produce water again. A space-ship
could have two vertical fins, protruding from the top
and bottom of the ship, which would gather in the
sun's energy like giant photo-electric cells, and trans-
form that energy into electricity. Then the Electricity
thus gained could be used to break up a sizeable
amount of distilled water into its component parts,
which could then be ignited by the same electricity,
and exploded in a combustion chamber to propel the
ship.

Then, as the two elements form water all over again,
the water thus formed could be returned to the fuel
tank, with a small loss, I suppose, and used over
again. This borders on perpetual motion. When flying
on the dark side of a planet it could run on auxilliary
batteries . — • 816 Soledad Avenue, Santa Barbara, Calif.

It’s an idea, S. Naturally anything that
runs on water would need fins. too. And as
long as hydrogen sulphide wasn’t the result,
everyone on board should be reasonably
comfortable, other factors being equal. Let’s
hear some sane answers from some of you
scientific-minded readers.

CHEER FROM SNEARY

By Rick Sneary

That was a most interesting editorial you had in
dear old TWS this time. It really looks as if you might
be reforming. Well while you’re in a good mood let
me tell you a couple things. California is not going to
be left out of the future in the stars. The UCLA is
offering a class in space navigation this year, with a
well known astronomer as teacher. No fooling!

Another thing — we have our own Pacific Coast
Rocket Society, which is working on rocket motors
and hopes to be one of the first to be able to use
Atomic Power when and if it is released to the public.
So on one side we see men planning rockets, and on
the other men training to fly them. California was our
“last frontier,” it may well be our last stop before
space. How about hearing what the other states are
doing?

And now for the Dec. TWS. And on the cover we
find the girl from the SS’s “Valley of the Flame” Cov-
er, along with Cap. Footure.

So you like the way I rate stories. QS, I’ll do it
again. Stories are in order of preference, with points
for (in order) plausibility, characterization and style.
(I’m using your words. They are better than mine.)
They rate 10.00. nothing wrong. 5.“"

Gaaaash!

1. GRIM RENDEZVOUS

2. PHALID’S FATE

3. THE END

4. I AM EDEN

5. THE GHOSTS OF MELVIN PYE

6. PARDON MY MISTAKE

7. LIFE ON THE MOON
The Reader Speaks was about average. Even with my

letter it wasn’t outstanding. But then this change

[Turn page ]

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over from fun to peace is throwing a few of the boys
off stride . — 2962 Santa Ana St., South Gate, Calif.

Okay, Rick. Your stuff about rockets in
California is intriguing. And we would like
to hear more about the subject from any lo-
cality where such activity is in progress.

FINAL RATING

By Ben Singer

After nosing through the December ish of TWS, I
came accross something good. (Not that that's unusual
in WONDER.) That something was “The End.” Lein-
ster’s masterpiece was the highlight of the issue.

In second place was “Phalid’s Fate.” Though the plot
wasn’t, new, it was treated in a different manner.
Usually the hero in this type of story is a robot. Jack
Vance (Has he any other names?) is a rising author,
and when he gets to the top, I’m sure he’ll stay.

I see you have a couple of old-timers writing for
you again. I can remember A. Leo Zagat and Fletcher
Pratt from way back in the early thirties. I hope
they are as successful in the future as in the past.
Zagat’s story was pretty good, though Pratt’s was under
par.

You represent yourself as being a science-fiction
magazine. After reading “The Ghosts of Melvin Pye”
I wonder. Since when do stf magazines run ghost
stories?

“Life on the Moon” wasn’t too bad. Most authors
write of the moon as “airless and lifeless” though it
is refreshing to read something different.

I didn’t care for Kuttner’s novelr In fact I don’t
like most of his fantasy. He writes some good science-
fiction though.

All in all it was pretty good ish, Sarge, except for
the ghost and the Kuttner yam I could of graded it
excellent . — 3242 Monterey, Detroit 6, Michigan.

Okay, Ben, and that’s that for this issue.
STF magazines run ghost stories as of our
December, 1946, issue, and that is that. You
evidently missed the point of Smalaman’s
Moon story. The “life” was a Martian on the
same errand as the Tellurian hero. Oh, well,
let it go. . . .

Nice crop of letters, people. It was fun
reading them and selecting those printed
above. Let’s have an even better crop next
time. The Sar. . . .your editor is ready and
waiting. Adios.

—THE EDITOR.

BROTHERHOOD-

Believe It, Live It, Support It!

O BSERVE American Brotherhood Week,
February 16 to 23, 1947, sponsored by
the National Conference of Christians
and Jews. Brotherhood is the pattern for peace!
Work in your community — through your church,
your business, your school — to promote the Amer-
ican principles of racial and religious freedom!

110

THE STORY

BEHIND

THE STORY

W ELL, the boys were in early this issue
with their explanations, halting or
otherwise, of how they got that way. For,
more than in any other form of fiction,
pseudo-science demands an idea upon which

to build — it cannot exist acceptably merely
upon characterization, situation and mood,
though all three of these frequently vital
story hormones are important in scientific-
tion.

Henry Kuttner, whose WAY OF THE
GODS does so much to make this edition of
TWS a memorable one, has been for some
time preoccupied with the possibilities of
mutation — a not unreasonable premise, what
with atomic bombs and dust and cosmic rays
about to be released upon a reluctant world.

At any rate, a problem in this suhject
popped into his head and the result — since
Mr. Kuttner is very talented and a born story
teller— is WAY OF THE GODS. Here is how
it came about, in its author’s own words:

If you’ve got a normal man you’ve got a monster.
The norm is purely an arbitrary symbol. “Mr. Average
Citizen” doesn’t exist in reality. He’s a handy semantic
term, that’s all. You could have one man in the world
with two heads, and one with no head, the norm
wouldn’t alter at all — the balance would still be there.

What with secondary radiations and certain uranium
byproducts — such as atomic bombs — it’s quite possible
that forced mutations have already been born, after
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the New Mexico experiments.
Generally speaking, if an embryo is too freakish, it
won’t be viable. It won’t reach full term — laws of nat-
ural selection simply erase the biological mistake that
has been made. But some of these mutants may be
born, and they may live.

Anything can happen then.

The human germ-plasm is capable of incredible vari-
ations. Look at freak shows. Look at anthropological
history. Teratology isn’t unknown to medicine. Some
mighty odd specimens have lived and reached maturity,
and the genes and chromosomes of these specimens
weren’t bombarded with radioactivity before concep-
tion took place.

We may get some odder specimens from now on.

In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king.
Sure — but in the country of the one-eyed the one-eyed
man is . normal. Take a group of mutated freaks —

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freaks by our standards, variants from our arbitrary
norm. They’re monsters, Unless you find an environ-
ment where such types are the rule rather than the
exception.

The idea intrigued me. Thus—*

WAY OF THE GODS. Hope you like it!

We do, Henry, we do. WAY OF THE
GODS struck us between the intellectual eyes
at first reading with its brilliance and varia-
tion from the orthodox in fiction.

And now George O. Smith rings in with
an explanation of how he incorporated a leg-
endary but far too currently evident figure
of demi-cosmic fun named K-lr-y into the
ubiquitous Jordan Green of QUEST TO
CENTAURUS, whose interplanetary capers
are not at all what they seem.

Come to think of it his explanation had bet-
ter be good. So:

Being very honest about it, the tale of Jordan Green
is based, as the character in the story said it was —
“In World War One it was ‘Where’s Elmer?’ and in
World War Two it was Kilroy.”

Throughout the legends of civilization there appear
everlastingly the names of famous travelers whose
ability to go where the foot of man never trod before
is the one factor that keeps the name fresh in the
memory.

Whether Homer was oft confronted with the Grecian
equivalent of “Odysseus, King of Ithaca, was here,”
will probably never be known. Well, if that was good
enough for Homer to start an epic on, it is good enough
for George O. Smith.

At any rate, a group of us were on the Baltimore
and Ohio between the home office and one of the most
restricted of the war laboratories when the first tales
of the now-famous Kilroy started to filter through.

On the wall of the Pullman car were scrawled, boldly
and with a proud flourish, the familiar words. This
started a discussion that lasted far into the night and
over many a tinkling glass of ice water.

The discussion, of course, consisted of tabulating
places where Kilroy couldn’t possibly have been.

We touched upon the amusement quality of the
legend and we carried on at great length as to the
possible psychology of the man who adds to the legend
of another man’s name. Not being even close to psy-
chologists or psychiatric experts we gave up.

We left the problem lying between a “passion for
anonymity” and recognition of the fact that, when
Kilroy was to have been everywhere so that folks
would seek his name, no one would give a hang wheth-
er Joe Zilch claimed to have been in an occasional
place either first or later.

The following morning, we entered the Inner Sanc-
tum of a laboratory where the foot of the uninitiated,
unfingerprinted and unknown never had been set. in
through the barred and guarded inner doors we went,
being scrutinized and authorized and —

There, in the innermost chamber where the voice
was reverently hushed automatically when it uttered
any word pertaining to science, was the familiar
scrawl —

“Kilroy gets around, doesn’t he!”

Obviously no one but a group of superbeings -playing
jokes on the human race could have penetrated to that
depth. There was one thing left to do — get it down on
paper to prepare Terra for the forthcoming New Post-
war Galaxy!

Which brings us to that brilliant new
author, William Fitzgerald, and the why of
his amazing THE GREGORY CIRCLE. And
Fitzgerald’s explanation is so complete that it
needs no comment from this uneasy chair.

States the author:

THE GREGORY CIRCLE was suggested by a thing
that happened in the Harvard Mathematics Department
seme years ago. A starry-eyed farm boy appeared who
said that he thought he had made an important dis-

112

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eovery in mathematics, and would they look at it.
All professors of mathematics are hounded by people
who have squared the circle or trisected an angle, so
they’ve learned patience, but this professor had a shock.
This farm boy had made a discovery. A great discov-
ery. One of tiie greatest in the history of mathematics.
He had discovered logarithms.

There seems to be no doubt about it. Quite independ-
ently, without even high-school training — which would
have showed them to him — he’d invented logarithms
out of his own head. He was a hundred-odd years
late, but having no preparation or training for the
job, he had actually shown more genius than Napier,
who made the discovery first.

When I heard that story I began to think of other
people who have known most unlikely things without
knowing how they knew. It is a matter of history
that Joan of Arc knew more about placing artillery
than anybody in the world before her. An Egyptian
sculptor knew how to — and did — make a statue that
was so lifelike that they chained its leg to keep it
from walking away.

He didn’t know how he knew how 1 to do it. He
couldn’t teach anybody else, and no other Egyptian
sculptor ever learned. (The statue still exists, and it’s
good.)

And two thousand years ago somebody knew, with-
out knowing how he knew, that chaulmoogra oil would
help leprosy. He didn’t know how to use it — an acid
ester of the oil is the trick — but he knew the fact. And
away back in the B.C. days somebody mentioned in a
poem that Venus — the planet — had horns like the new
moon. He couldn't have told with the naked eye. He
simply couldn’t. He knew without knowing how he
knew.

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without knowing how he knew. THE GREGORY CIR-
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probability that there is somebody on earth right now
with Bud Gregory’s ability. It’s entirely possible. But
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know about it and be starting to build atomic motors
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